by Jay Lake
What had happened to my promise to stay out of the politics of the city?
Well, the politics of the city had not stayed out of me, for one thing.
Another memory stirred. “There is a folder. Where is it?”
Ilona pointed at a sheaf of documents on a small table beside my bed. “This?”
“Please,” I said. “Read it. I believe that I have passage on a ship to Kalimpura. We will need more, for you and Ponce and the babies, as well as Mothers Vajpai and Argai.” Guilty, I recalled Ilona’s own circumstances. “How are the two of you?”
“My head aches,” Ilona said simply. “And Mother Argai is still ill with whatever drug or poison was used on her.”
“He was a Quiet Man.” I knew only what Ghuji had told me, which was little enough, but if they used poisons, they were even more dangerous and despicable than I had realized.
“And you dealt with him.” Her voice was soft, but her face pained. “I thank you for my life, Green.”
It was clear enough what truly troubled her. “We are leaving soon to reclaim your daughter.”
Ilona glanced down at the papers. “On this afternoon’s tide!” she exclaimed. “Two cabins aboard Prince Enero.”
I tried to sit up, but my left arm simply would not take my weight. Then the agony from even making that effort overcame me completely.
When my words came back to me, everyone was already in motion. I tried to give some instructions, but no one seemed to want them. Even my suggestion about securing a third cabin was already under discussion before I had managed to make it.
Finally I simply lay back and let them arrange these next steps. Clearly, I could not do everything today. For a while I worried about Marya’s silk, and mine which I had not sewn last night either, but I realized Ilona would not forget those.
My only real regret was not paying another call on the Red House before my departure. I did not regret failing to give Councilor Lampet funerary rites, though I did find myself promising to pay my respects to the shades of his guards.
* * *
They took me down to the docks around midday in the back of an ice wagon that had been pressed into service. The bed was covered with a canvas top, and filled with damp straw, clumps of sawdust, and thick, wet blankets. Ilona and Mother Vajpai came along. My babies did not.
“Where are the children?” I asked, suppressing a flash of panic that Marya and Federo had not been brought down with me. They’d been taken away not half an hour before, “to be changed.”
“Ponce took the babies,” Ilona said with a glance at Mother Vajpai, who nodded. “With the training handle.”
Interesting. “Are we in this much danger?”
Mother Vajpai snorted. “Someone killed a councilor of this city yesterday. There are groups of very angry armed men about searching for the culprit.”
“… and all three of our Lily Blades are disabled,” I said, finishing the thought. Mother Vajpai would probably never be a fully effective fighter again, Mother Argai was reportedly quite ill, and I could not move my left arm, nor overcome a headache that made my skull feel far too large and far too soft.
“Even the Interim Council’s thugs cannot do much once we are aboard,” Ilona added. “Prince Enero is a Sunward kettle ship. They have much better weapons than anyone in Copper Downs.”
Which was true. I was aware of the rumors of firearms and lightning jars and bombs-of-fire. Michael Curry carried such a weapon, small enough to be held in his hand, when I had slain him aboard Crow Wing. The Stone Coast had only the most primitive and useless guns, as much a danger to their wielder as anyone. Very few here found reason to trifle with purchasing a better quality from afar. Likewise Selistan, where even matters of violence tended to be resolved very personally, and ideally with considerable finesse.
Politics did not benefit from blowing up palaces. Well, except in the case of the Red House.
So I sat back and listened to our progress, trying to gain a sense of the route the drover took by gauging the surrounding noises and odors, and heeding the changing echoes of the cobbles, pavers, and bricks that had become so familiar beneath my feet.
* * *
At the docks, Prince Enero was moored alongside the Gramonde Wharf. That was a bit interesting in its own right, as Gramonde handled very little cargo, instead servicing the quiet ships of the wealthy, as well as courier packets and other vessels whose masters desired limited attention from those on shore. As a side benefit of that, Gramonde also enjoyed far less of the fish-guts-and-tide-wrack reek that characterized so much of any working waterfront.
Did the Harbormaster play a role in this? Paulus Jessup had been cagey about the politics of the city since the fall of the Duke some four years past. Or perhaps the ship’s captain simply liked paying higher mooring fees and demurrage.
The ice wagon clattered slowly away from where we’d been dropped off. The women around me gathered baggage and checked papers while I took my last look at Copper Downs. It was nice to be free of my own responsibilities for once.
I found to my own surprise that I was sorry to be leaving. Even from there I could spot many familiar landmarks. The sense of direction in my head supplied more hidden from view by the folds of land or the sides of warehouses. The last remaining section of the ancient wall, now marking the boundary of the Ivory Quarter well within the city’s current extents. To the east, the Dockmarket edging down to the water. A string of familiar taverns. The ridge to the north where the Duke’s old palace stood, not to mention the Red House.
The Temple Quarter was far away, as was the Velviere District and the Temple of Endurance there. I had not bidden a proper farewell to the ox god, but I knew he would understand. Most of my good-byes had been rushed or omitted. This city did not want to let me go.
“We must board, Green,” said Mother Vajpai gently in Seliu. Her hand lay upon my good right arm. My left arm we had bound up for this trip across town, judging the constraint less painful and dangerous than the possibility of me being jarred along the way, or catching myself against the gate of the wagon or a stray rope while boarding.
“Not yet.” I had one more departure to observe. “I’ll want a candle, some matches, and, well, some wine or flowers.”
“There is no one to woo here.”
Humor? Now? I shot Mother Vajpai a hard look. “If you will not help me in this, give me an obol or two and let me sort it for myself. I’ll be perhaps thirty minutes.”
Mother Vajpai appealed to Ilona, saying in her passable Petraean, “She wants a candle and a flower.”
Ilona shrugged, casting me a rueful smile. “This is Green.” She called over Wencilla, one of our escorts from the Bustle Street Lazaret’s developing handle—a promising girl of strong frame unlikely to marry well, as she lacked both family and beauty. “Please fetch Mother Green a candle and a flower.”
“And lucifer matches,” I said. “Wine if you cannot find a few blossoms.”
Wencilla nodded and trotted off. A chandler would carry what I needed, but only if I wished a box of candles or a cask of wine. She might have better luck with a decently stocked tavern.
This was not my problem, either.
I sat down on a pitted iron bollard and watched Ponce pass my children and their bags back and forth with another young woman from the lazaret while they readied for the ship. I would need to feed the babies soon, I knew from my own aches, but not out here on the Gramonde Wharf.
Where the bags had come from, I did not know. All our belongings had burned with the tent. The mysterious, collaborative economy of women had produced them, no doubt, through the lazaret and its many friends both high and low in this city. I had never really been a part of that connection, having not been raised with an open kitchen door out of which to pass gossip or just the hours.
Still, I respected the connection. It was the same sisterhood, after all, in its deepest form, that stood behind first Marya-the-late-goddess, and then Mother Iron who followed her. It w
as my great hope that Marya-my-infant-daughter would take her place among that world someday.
For my children, I realized, I prized ordinariness above all things. This city had been captor and prison and fighting pit for me. Kalimpura would with any luck at all simply be home for them.
My thoughts darkened in that vein until Wencilla returned with two fat beeswax candles only a little burned down; a box of lucifer matches; a pair of small, early roses; and a half-empty bottle of wine. All of it was in a string bag a woman could carry one-handed.
“I judged speed more important than the finest quality,” she said by way of apology.
“You judged correctly,” I replied in my kindest voice. Her basic common sense cheered me somewhat. “I will return,” I told her, as well as Mother Vajpai, who hovered nearby.
A watergate opened from Below near the Gramonde Wharf, but I did not just then have the ability to make the climb down to it. Not with my left arm so thoroughly useless. I knew of a grating on Montrose Street, the road that ran a block inland parallel to these docks, but again, I did not think I could lift my way into it. I glanced at Wencilla. “Will you come with me part of the way?”
Prince Enero’s kettle whistle shrieked a long blast, follow by two short. She would be sailing within the hour. There was not much time.
We walked swiftly as I could but in silence. I pretended at a peace I did not yet, or perhaps would never, feel. Montrose Street was lined with go-downs and the offices of small traders and freight brokers and the like, along with the sorts of businesses that catered in turn to them and their clients. There were far more horses tied up here than were in similar places in Kalimpura, where most people managed their affairs on foot. Quite a few carts, too, but I realized I saw the mounts of both couriers and men of substance.
The grating was in a little stretch of ragged grass, just behind a statue of Lord Shallot slaying the Great Worm. The statue itself was covered with bird droppings and painted scrawls, and not been attended to for far more years than I had been alive.
That was fine with me.
“Can you please open the grate?” I asked Wencilla.
She studied the metal. “There is a lock.”
Surprised, I looked. Someone had indeed brazed a hasp to the metalwork and placed a new lock. A rush of frustrated anger reddened my vision. I did not know who might have done that or why, and in this moment I silently cursed them.
I set down my string bag and drew my remaining short knife to see if I could flick at either the hasp or the lock’s loop. It was a dreadful thing to do to a good blade, but time was short and getting shorter.
To my shock, the hasp cut loose under a light pressure from my short knife. Pulling it back to study the shiny, fresh-sliced metal, I recalled that the god Blackblood’s own blood had stained my pair of blades.
And they had cut all too well since then. Frighteningly so. If I had not been so hurried and distracted, I would have seen it already for myself.
Thoughtfully, I slid the point into a gap in the grate. With a bit of effort, I cut one of the cross bars in two.
This. I’d had two weapons like this, and in my stupor after the fight there had left one of them behind at the Red House. I hoped Councilor Lampet appreciated the mighty grave gift I never intended to send with him from this world.
With luck, someone had simply put it away, or dropped it in the smith’s scrap bin. I hated to think of this knife’s mate loose in Copper Downs. I hated even more to think of it not in my hands.
I sat back while Wencilla opened the grate. Fortunate, that she was strong and large enough to heft the dead weight of the rusted metal. One-handed and slow, I managed to descend the ladder. At my request, she came partway down with the string bag, then scuttled back up once I’d claimed my burden. The stinking darkness of Below required a certain familiarity before one could be remotely comfortable within it.
A few steps away from the dim light of the grate’s shaft, I squatted down and began my ritual. At least this bit of tunnel was not a flowing sewer. Small blessings were where you found them.
I set out my candles, closed my eyes against the flare of the match, then lit the tapers. Fire Below was generally a very bad idea for several quite sensible reasons, but I needed to do this. I placed the flowers before the candles, scattered a few drops of wine, and put the bottle between them. Finally I pricked my finger—for I was afraid to slit my palm with this god-struck blade, lest it rip my hand all the way through unintended—and bled a few drops with the wine.
Libation, among the oldest ceremonies; candles for honor and prayer; and flowers for the women who were protected by Desire and Her daughters.
“Mother Iron,” I said aloud. “You hear me, I am certain.” Such prayers were never wrong, because an inattentive god would know no different, while one who was present would be pleased by the flattery. “I am leaving this place. Leaving you behind, along with all the others who have touched me, or whom I have touched.” I squeezed a few more drops of blood. “Grant whatever protection is yours for the passage ahead, both to me and those who travel with me. Let Laris and the women of the lazaret serve you as best they can, and watch over them and all women here. And finally, I thank you.”
I added a scattering of tears to the offering, then rose on creaking knees with my balance upset to walk back to the ladder.
Before I mounted the slimed metal rungs, I looked back. One of the candles had gone out already. The other guttered in a gust of hot, metal-scented air that reached me like an oven door had been slammed open.
She was close by, then, my tulpa-turned-goddess. I wished her well against the Saffron Tower should they send more agents after the defeated Iso and Osi, and began to climb. Beneath my feet, a great, muscled hand stripped of its flesh touched the lowest rung, visible in the light from above.
So Skinless had been watching over me as well. And through him, the god Blackblood.
I looked down and said, “Farewell, friend. May you find whatever it is you desire most from your god.”
Once above, Wencilla replaced the grate and we hurried back to the ship before she cast off without us. My babies needed me, and I desperately wanted more time to rest, and a cabin to rest in. Kalimpura was two or three weeks’ voyage distant, depending on weather and the seas. I had no illusions that I would be fully prepared for my return there, no matter how long the voyage took.
At Sea, Neither Lost Nor Forgotten
DESPITE MY RESOLVE to rest, I found myself watching from the stern rail as Prince Enero sailed from Copper Downs. Kettle ships were not at the mercy of the winds, but wave and current nonetheless pushed her just like any sailing vessel. Still, she could leave the harbor without either the towing or the careful tacking that our own Stone Coast vessels would require. Or, indeed, Selistani. Neither the people of my birth nor my reluctantly adopted home had the trick of building the great steam kettles ourselves. The few such iron-hearted and iron-hulled ships that were flagged out of ports along the Storm Sea had been bought at great cost from the Sunward cities that held such knowledge close to hand. Even then, their masters still required engineers hired from those lands to operate and maintain the vessels.
Prince Enero was flagged from the place that built her, a city known as Bas Gronegrim. Though I would someday learn much more of the cities of the Sunward Sea, that meant nothing to me then. Besides which, my mind was at that time still much on Copper Downs receding before me.
As our distance increased beneath a trailing cloud of wheeling gulls, my vantage strengthened. The rising land of the city unfolded before me, until I could see the domes and spires of the Temple Quarter, the walls around the old mine shaft where Chowdry was building Endurance’s temple, and even the site where the burnt shell of the Factor’s house still stood, monument to the long imprisonment of my childhood. I was disappointed that the ruins themselves were too low for me to spot from this distance. My attention traced through the city, my mind following familiar streets and their co
rresponding—and sometimes conflicting—passages below.
The hills beyond were visible, albeit hazy from the smokes of commerce, industry, and cooking that tens of thousands of people living close together will make. Those slopes were in turn the foothills of the more distant mountains that the Petraeans called the High Hills. Through them I could trace a route to Ilona’s abandoned cottage and the graves where Mistress Danae, my last surviving human teacher from the old days, still slept in her endless dreams of madness. Beyond even those High Hills, the Blue Mountains loomed on the purpling horizon. I had never visited that home of the pardines I was unsure I would ever meet again.
The wind took my tears as fast as my eyes could shed them. I was thankful no one stood close enough to mark my face just then. There was nothing for me to mourn there. Only memories to leave behind: lost years, many deaths, and the birth of my children. I returned to Kalimpura to rescue our missing hostages, but in my heart I intended to stay in Selistan’s great city. The brawling, hot chaos of my own people was my place, even if I would never truly be one of them.
My fellow Selistani saw me as a northern slave, who never talked quite right and never quite understood everything. I knew this from my time in the Temple of the Silver Lily. I also knew that I was loved and respected there. Most important, the ghosts around the Duke and the echoes of his power that never ceased to devil me in Copper Downs could not so easily trouble me across the waters of the Storm Sea in distant Kalimpura. Or at least so I’d hoped at that time.
Eventually the city was a rough blur on the horizon. I could see another kettle ship making from the harbor for the open sea, its plume of smoke serving as a banner to mark its passage. My left arm was growing less numb and more painful, and my breasts ached. I went to see to my children, and rest awhile. The group of us could plot our arrival over the weeks to come. Corinthia Anastasia and Samma wanted rescuing, Surali awaited my vengeance, and surely affairs in the Temple of the Silver Lily cried to be set right.
All that beckoned from some point in the future. That day was for departing.