by Jay Lake
No Lucia.
I sagged, relieved, then backed swiftly out of the circle of embers to dance from one foot to the other until they had cooled down.
By the time I was ready to brave the other chest, from the far side of the circle where the edge drew closest to it, a small crowd had formed around me. Someone brought me strips of wet canvas and tied them around my boots. Ponce sat on the blanket with Ilona and Mother Argai, still cradling both babies, but I had many other willing hands to help me prop the tent pole high and push it into the other chest.
That one opened with a wave of smell like roasted pork. Behind me, someone vomited into the ashes. I stepped close on my wrapped shoes and peered within. Her neck had been broken, either to kill her or to fit her into the chest. At least she had not died screaming in the flames. He must have slain her first and hidden the body more carefully to buy time.
“Lay her out as soon as it is safe to do so,” I said roughly. “And the dead man. I will light the candles and pray for them both.” Each of them was owed that respect from me, albeit for different reasons. I turned to walk away from the tents into the darkness around the stone temple’s construction.
It was time to breathe some clean air.
* * *
I sat on a granite block and stared upward into the night. Only the stars looked down upon me—the moon had not yet arrived in the eastern sky.
Certain mystes aver that the world is a plate, wide as a man can walk in a lifetime and long as the cosmos itself. I had no reason to doubt this, nor any reason to believe this, but I had always wondered what role the stars played. Surely they were more than mere piercings in the curtain of night?
Right then I felt as cold and distant and small as any of the stars in this evening’s sky. I had hurt a man, very badly, then made sure his death was as painful as possible. I would do so again between any one heartbeat and next to keep my children safe. But they never would be safe enough.
So long as I moved freely through this world, my enemies would follow.
Perhaps I would be better off behind walls and surrounded by guards. Had I so long ago taken the place originally intended for me as the Duke’s consort, I would have been thusly secured. Like a pearl wedged inside an oyster, requiring a knife the size of an army to extract me.
Alone, any one man could pursue me. Anyone on a rooftop could kill me before I knew I was being attacked. I was a danger to everyone around me.
Most especially my children.
Anyone who sought their lives would be doing so to punish me. No inheritance of land or money or great title rode on the shoulders of little Federo and tiny Marya. The only treasure they carried was my own blood.
What was I to do?
In the darkness, I wept a little while. I had lost Lucia, my sly and willing bathing partner and sometime lover. Who yet knew how much hurt had been done to Ilona or Mother Argai?
My would-be assassin had kept them alive with an intent to torment me if he could. By now everyone knew the people of this temple would raise neither fist nor weapon against an invader. By what power did Endurance protect his own?
By my power, of course.
I began to laugh, mirthless and bitter. “When I go across the sea,” I said into the darkness, “who will take care of these little problems for you?” Chowdry had once been a pirate, and had quite possibly in the course of his sailing days slit more throats than I ever would, but he was settled in now as the priest. The man took the will of his pacifistic ox god seriously.
Someone else would have to be the god’s knife. Not I. Not any longer.
I sighed, stood, and walked back to the tents. I was long overdue to feed my babies, for all that it was night. Then I would check on my wounded. Then as promised, I would lay out the dead, painting them both with the red and the white, and setting the candles around their silent heads for both sin and virtue. Finally, I would sew that day’s bell onto my silk and think on the meaning of all this.
Then on the morrow I would go find a bedamned ship and arrange to leave this terrible, cold city. But first in the morning I would find whoever had been sheltering my attacker in the months since Surali’s departure. Whoever that was would be very, very sorry before I was done with them.
* * *
When the day returned, I was so stiff, I could barely move. Last night’s troubles had vastly overtaxed me. We had sent Ilona and Mother Argai both to the Bustle Street Lazaret late that evening, so I had no one to help me with my children either. Their crying had awoken me.
Groggy, I wondered whose tent I slept in. I pulled Federo to my breast first and felt the strangely comforting bite of his gummy mouth against my nipple. It was somewhere between joy and pain, but not in the rough way that most of the Blades played at their sex. Something more maternal, more primal.
Once he had suckled his fill, I lifted Marya to my other nipple. I whispered apologies to her for making her wait. It was never too early to explain the ways of men to a young woman, for her own protection. Brothers were men as well.
The children fed and burped, I dressed myself. Truly I wished for a deep, hot bath, but the day awaited. Vengeance and transportation were my agenda for the morning. With luck, I could handle both and be back before dinner.
I looked outside the tent, ready to shout for Ponce, only to find him dozing seated on the ground just by the flap. He awoke at my touch on his shoulder. “Will you mind the babies while I run a few errands in preparing to depart?”
The smile I got in return was almost too devoted. “I am yours,” he said.
“Be my children’s.” I handed both of them to him. “You run the kitchen, I don’t need to tell you where to find the goat’s milk. How are Ilona and Mother Argai?”
He frowned as he hefted the babies. “There has been no word from the lazaret this morning, which I suppose is a good thing.”
“I shall see to them later,” I said, resolving to visit the two while about the city today. Swaggering a little, I left him. I kept my proud step until I’d passed out of the gate, then nearly collapsed against the wall. I could not do this.
What choice did I have?
It was time to go see my countrymen. Someone among them would likely know where Surali’s agents had been sheltering. Besides, then I could bid farewell to the Tavernkeep, in whose establishment so many of my fellow Selistani sheltered and drank away their meager laborer’s wages.
Obols and taels never went as far as one needed them to.
* * *
The Tavernkeep’s place was a nameless bar in the Brewery District, down an alley and through a door with no sign. When my old teacher the Dancing Mistress had first taken me there, it had been quiet, almost haunted, with few patrons besides the scattering of pardines who came down out of their distant hilltops and montane forests for whatever business called their kind among humans.
Long ago, that business had been slaughter. In time, wars had settled affairs between humans and pardines. Then the late Duke of Copper Downs had stolen one of the hearts of their magic in the form of the gems called the Eyes of the Hills. His power had been released by my killing of him only to settle into Federo in the form of the violent god Choybalsan. In turn, I had then killed Federo, and seated the power into the ox-god Endurance, before finally arranging the return of the stolen but now-quiescent gems to the pardines.
My relationship with these people was complicated.
Now their one retreat within Copper Downs had been taken over in large measure by Selistani immigrants and refugees. The Tavernkeep and his conspecifics had borne this with remarkably good grace, and surely for more than the sake of a busy till.
I slipped down the alley, too tired and worn to take to the roofs and not trusting myself besides on the high paths. Below would be no better in my current condition. Frankly, if some assassin with a crossbow were waiting for me high up, she could have me.
Though it was early for a bar, the Tavernkeep was behind his counter taking inventory of a rac
k of bottles on the back wall. Tall, rangy, furred with pointed ears and a long whisking tail, he looked like nothing so much as a great cat up on two legs. This was a dangerous confusion—pardines were far more powerful and capricious than any house pet. I’d had inklings of their might, and did not care to see more.
Otherwise the room was quiet—the perpetual dice games played by my countrymen waiting for work, word, or wages had not yet resumed for the day. Many of them were stretched by the faint remains of the fire, wrapped in cloaks or thin blankets. The large round tables with the pardines’ traditional stone bowls were scattered across the room, interspersed with smaller, human-scale furniture that seemed to have multiplied every time I visited this place.
“Green!” The Tavernkeep seemed delighted to see me. “It has been some time. Have you littered successfully?”
That took me a moment to unravel. “Yes,” I said. “I have borne twins, a boy Federo and a girl Marya.”
“Fine human names, I am certain.” He laid out a stoneware bowl and poured me some of the clear and deadly pardine bournewater. “Welcome.”
“Thank you.” I took a sip. As always, the drink was clear as morning air, deadly as last weekend’s sin. “You are too kind.”
“One honors what has come before.”
“Indeed.” I turned to look at my sleeping countrymen. Our voices were provoking a few of them to stir. Facing the Tavernkeep once more, I smiled. “Shortly I shall leave Copper Downs. I may not be back for some years. Or possibly ever.” Some prophecies were simple enough to make.
“Across the sea again.” He frowned at a twisted bottle of something clear and violently red. “The Dancing Mistress did not care for your foreign city.”
“Kalimpura is not foreign to those who live there.”
“All cities are foreign,” he replied with the fervent conviction of the mountain-born.
I raised my bowl to him and carefully took another sip. One of my few regrets of the path of my life since those days has been that I shall quite possibly never taste bournewater again. “In any event, I have come to bid you farewell, and ask certain needed questions of my fellow southerners before I depart.”
With a wide sweep of his arm, the Tavernkeep gave me freedom of the room. “They are yours.”
“Sadly, yes.” I smiled.
“Would you like some dhal when you are done?”
I cocked an eye at him. “You cook Selistani now?” His kitchen had cooked Selistani for a year or more, but always with human hirelings. Chowdry, specifically, at least until the business of the Temple of Endurance had grown to engulf his days.
“One learns,” he said modestly, followed by a spitting word that had to be the pardine tongue, though I had quite rarely heard that language spoken.
“One does,” I said, taking careful note of the sounds of his people. “As I am a brave woman, I shall try your dhal.”
Leaving my bowl behind, and eschewing the din of pot and spoon this time, I went to wake those at their slumbers and ask them certain questions.
* * *
I spent an instructive time speaking quietly to sleepy men.
These were my people. Not just in the sense of sharing a birthplace or a skin color. Or even, to a degree, a language—I would never be quite as fluent in Seliu as I was in Petraean, though I had shaken the Stone Coast accent that was in my voice when I first relearned my native tongue. Rather, it was this group that had stood frightened in the snowy streets of the Velviere District to oppose Surali and her thugs not with fist or stave or sword, but simply by their presence.
These men—some of them, at any rate—had stared down crossbows and swords for me. And they’d done it under Mother Argai’s leadership. In doing so, they had taught me that violence did not always have to be met with more violence.
This was a new idea for me in those days.
I explained that Mother Argai had been hurt and almost killed by an attacker intent on harming me and my children. That another young woman had been killed and my tent burned. They were solemn and sorrowful until I mentioned this was Surali’s doing. The muttering that arose from that was more than satisfactory.
I knew that Surali’s Bittern Court must have a few informers, and perhaps even an active agent or two, among these men. That was too easy an opportunity to pass up. How active was a different question. As well as how loyal.
“Even in defeat, retreated from this place, that woman seeks to strike me down. Others, innocents, have again died in my stead by her orders.” I squatted low, bringing my face down closer to these men, most of whom were still lying in their blankets as we spoke. “You know that she does not stand for what you wish in life. If any of you were truly her creatures, you would not have troubled to cross the sea to this cold place.”
It was the same argument I had used on them before. Selistan was not a society that encouraged people to rise above the station of their birth.
“Every one of you had the bravery to come here. Every one of you works hard now, or seeks to. Most of you will bring families over in time when you have saved enough taels and obols. Surali and her kind do not care for you. Do not care about you. She does not want choice. And so she attacks me, who shows all of you what you might be and who you might become.”
Not exactly a true accounting of Surali’s motives as I understood them, but not so far from the reality, either. And this casting of her intent would make sense to my countrymen.
Several of them glanced at one of their number. He was skinny, with a large mustache, and seemed to be preoccupied with scratching under his sleeping robe.
That would be my man, then. I continued to play to my audience.
“Someone in this city has hidden a dangerous agent of the Bittern Court away. The man who tried to kill my babies was dressed in leather head to toe.”
“So are you,” observed a member of my still awakening audience.
“Well, yes, but that’s different. I’m a Lily Blade. Besides, this would-be killer’s face was covered, too. Except for the eyes.” It had been a strange costume.
“Who is he?” asked the agent, paying closer attention now. “What did he tell you?”
“Mostly he screamed.” I let an edged smile tug at my mouth. “People tend to do that when they are dying in pain.”
A number of the men winced, including the agent. I stood and stepped over to him. “I know that people sometimes make mistakes,” I said gently. “Mistakes can be forgiven.” I bent down, my knees creaking and my abdominal muscles complaining as I did so. “But sheltering this killer? That will not be forgiven.” With one finger I tapped his sweating forehead. “That will be punished.”
All these men knew who I was. Every one of them knew my reputation. Just so this fellow, who shook a bit. I popped one of my short knives out of the right sleeve of my leathers and slapped the blade lightly against my left hand. “If you happen to know of someone who might have given this man shelter, I would be pleased to hear of it. I might even forget where I heard it, should what I find bear fruit. Because I will harvest a reckoning for the threat to my children.”
“I am a poor man,” he gasped.
“We are all poor.” The circling point of my short knife had seized his vision.
“I-I am p-poor. Sometimes there is a bit of extra money.”
“Sometimes there is.” I let the point approach his nose, until he grew cross-eyed. “Sometimes there is forgiveness after confession, too.” Speaking brightly, I added, “Which would you rather have just this moment? Forgiveness, or a bit of extra money?”
His gaze fixed on the tip of my blade. “F-forgiveness, Mother Green.”
Leaning even closer, I growled in his ear, “Then give me a reason to forgive you, fool.”
His words flowed now. “A-a man, one of these whitebellies, in-in-in a uniform. I always m-met him by the great red house on Montane Street. S-sometimes they are needing things written or read back to them in Seliu. I knew they kept one of us inside.”
>
May all these pale bastards be broken on the Wheel! The great red house on Montane Street would have to be the seat of the Reformed Council. Originally a mansion, it had long served as a bank until Lampet and his little band of plotters had set up a second government to compete with the Interim Council that had ruled the city since the fall of the Duke.
Though I’d already abandoned the politics of Copper Downs, they had apparently not abandoned me.
It made sense. Especially given how Surali had worked through the Prince of the City’s embassy to manipulate the local government here, when they had been in town.
I slapped my short knife against my palm again. Councilor Lampet and I were due to have a little chat quite soon. “You may keep your life,” I said generously to the spy. “But I might suggest new employment.”
“Th-thank you, Mother.” He scuttled back on hands and knees, leaving a warm puddle behind.
I was pleased that I had not killed him. Perhaps I was growing more mature after all. With a nod to my fascinated countrymen watching in riveted silence, I went back to the bar for my dhal.
* * *
As I was preparing to leave, one of the men came up to the bar to speak quietly with me.
“Ghuji, is it?” I said, dredging a name from memory. I signaled the Tavernkeep for a second bowl of dhal. Likely a small enough payment for whatever he had to tell me.
Ghuji nodded, then stared at his feet. I glanced down just in case he was wearing interesting shoes. Horny, callused nails on grubby toes greeted me.
A peasant, as I would have been, had I been allowed to remain in the country of my birth. That was a bit surprising. Most of the Selistani in Copper Downs were either sailors who’d jumped ship or laborers who’d come looking for a different kind of work. Selistani with any decent amount of money had no reason to emigrate, while the peasants and urban beggars had no resources with which to attempt an exodus.