by Jay Lake
Watching her totter out, limping yet, I wondered if I should have sent for a carriage. When she disappeared past the far side of the gate, I turned my attention to the pair of gems in my hand. Once again, I had a feeling I’d paid too much for too little reward. Except for their size, the stones were unremarkable enough to casual inspection. Blue and green, a pair of eyes that reminded me muchly of Michael Curry. I was fairly certain no one but a priest would sense the power that buzzed against my hand like a trapped wasp.
What if I had not killed him then? Would all this be different now? What if I had not just bullied Samma, hurt her to force the girl to my will?
I dismissed all of that as fruitless. It occurred to me that my very best source of information would be the Factor’s ghost, for in his guise as the Duke, he had first stolen these away from the pardines.
The flaws in that idea were readily apparent, and so I abandoned it. No, I was done with turning to those who had once held authority over me to ask for help and more help. To the Smagadine hells with the Interim Council, the Factor, and even Mother Vajpai. Armed once again with the power of a god, I would seek out Osi and Iso and craft a response of my own.
***
Out on the streets once more in my guise as a lad of Copper Downs, I ignored my fading guilt about Samma and instead mused on Erio’s fears. Surely the Eyes of the Hills were what had caught at the old ghost’s attention. His own years far predated the late Duke’s appropriation of the pardine artifacts, but Erio, much like the tulpas of Below, had been focused on the city throughout the entire sorry history of the gems. Their power, both as legacy and whatever remained directly invested in them today, was now too closely tied to Copper Downs. That these gems drew the pardine Revanchists with their atavistic ways back into the city would be deeply frightening to a soul who remembered the older days of pardine Hunts and the brutal wars with the human settlers of this land.
The feral aspect of the Dancing Mistress and her cohorts in the Tavernkeep’s place was surely a pathway to a much darker facet of her people, harkening to those older days. I had loved her for years in various ways, but she always held a frightening depth.
Sometimes I preferred a person of simple intentions. Samma, for example. Or me. I grew tired of outguessing the inscrutable motives of those taken up with ancient, invisible agendas. Looking back, I find it amazing how unaware of myself I was in those years.
As I turned onto Calabar Street, the air around me seemed to pop. Strange shadows danced on the walls even in broad daylight. For a moment my mouth filled with the metallic taste of power. Then a sound rumbled by, loud enough that it overwhelmed all the noise of the city. I had in the past been mere handspans away from lightning strikes, thanks to the kind attentions of Federo. This was worse.
Some around me fell, mostly through fear, as the ground did not buckle. Noting the alignment of the new shadows, I turned and sprinted back toward their source. Once I was heading that way, the column of smoke and rising, multicolored sparks was easy enough to spot.
The Temple Quarter? Had Blackblood done himself a mischief? My troubles could surely not be so easily solved.
I raced toward the Street of Horizons, leaping over people huddled by the curb, pushing past the more alert who fled in the opposite direction. This was no explosion of alchemical powders, I was certain. Nothing a man or woman could create would cause such a flash of light. This was magic, the divine, something supernatural.
I approached the Temple Quarter, my sprint converted to the ground-eating lope of a Blade run. I could see that the cloud rose from a block behind the Street of Horizons. That was a smaller road of which I did not know the name. I arrived at the scene to find a few dozen stunned acolytes and priests of several orders staring at a rubble pile out of which the last of the smoke and dust was boiling.
The remaining air was strangely clear, as if wiped of all impurities. Like the garden before time, when the birds and animals had not yet been awoken to breathe it in. The metal-in-mouth taste was strong here. I could see by the expressions of several of the watchers that they shared it.
Puffing, I pulled up to the group. I never breathe hard. Not like this! An argument with the baby, for later. One hand on my belly, trying not to be obvious, I asked, “Whose place was this?”
None of them even looked at me, until I plucked at one young boy’s robed arm. He turned and opened his mouth, popping his lips like a carp in a pond. I realized his ears were bleeding. He must have been deafened by the explosion.
All of them seemed to have been.
I hoped they had a god of hearing to pray to.
Instead of addressing them, I pushed through to the front of the semicircle of onlookers. “Go home!” I shouted, letting the words form large upon my lips. I touched my ears, then pointed to them, then shooed them away.
Even the older priests nodded, somewhat to my surprise. In my experience, men of a certain age simply don’t surrender authority to women or boys. Their willingness to heed me was a mark of how overwhelmed they felt.
I turned around and looked again. Their departure was also a mark of how utterly unlikely I was to find any survivors.
Given the intense nature of the explosion, I knew I would probably have a few minutes to myself. Especially with the smoke plume almost vanished, which would reduce the likelihood of a bucket brigade arriving.
Looking around, I realized that the damage had indeed been contained. While windows were shattered in all directions, only one building had collapsed. Rubble smoldered in front of me, beams shattered, bricks broken and ground to dust, the contents of the inside mixed into the mess-plates, a splintered table, a length of cloth.
I moved closer. The length of cloth enclosed a human leg, protruding from under a still-intact chunk of masonry the size of a large trunk. Now I wished I hadn’t sent the priests away so quickly. Still, the chunk was balanced precariously on a pile of smaller wreckage. And there was no lack of loose wood for levers.
Swiftly I wedged a seven-foot length of milled lumber into place under the high edge of the masonry. Even as I worked to that, I confirmed my impression that this place had been targeted very specifically.
Was this the Temple of Marya? That hand had been played before, after all.
Someone had tried to attack this temple several years ago, not long after the fall of the Duke. I’d heard the story when I was staying with Ilona, twice, about a long night of light and flame, and a horrid creature slain in the street, only to have the body vanish with the sunrise. This had all taken place during the brass-ape races, which were a time of debauchery and general foolishness. While I’d recognized the importance of the story, I’d discounted most of the details.
Mistakenly so, it seemed.
Putting my back into the makeshift lever, I reflected that I had been quite the fool. Working my strength into the effort, I reflected that I was continuing to be quite the fool, but for different reasons.
It took me three tries, and the lever shaking hard with a splintering crack, before the masonry slid away. I leaned into the resulting hollow to pick up a dead woman. There was no reason to believe I knew her, but even if I had, her face was crushed beyond recognition.
Still, I drew her out and laid her in the street with as much respect as I could muster. Doubting terribly, I climbed back into the rubble to look again.
It had been a strange explosion. I was no expert on artillery or the alchemical arts-far from it-but I was fairly certain objects exploded in either one direction or another. From inside to out, as it were. Or the other way around.
This looked as if someone had taken a bowl full of temple and beaten it with a strong spoon. Everything was folded and mixed. Some material had gone inward, some out. Certain objects were pulverized, others nearly whole.
I clambered over the wreckage, searching for more bodies and looking for I knew not what else. If the gods of the Temple Quarter had been roused before, an attack such as this should have them on their feet and e
rupting from their own rooftops. Or did even gods know fear?
Some of the bricks that appeared grimed enough to have been the old outer wall had chalk marks on them. Sigils. Spells. Random scribblings, perhaps.
As I searched through the piles, the metallic tang in the air faded. The place already had the air of an old rubble pile. Magic, taking the urgency of the moment with it, covering the site over with varnished layers of time. Climbing back down, I looked into the rubble gap from where I’d pulled the dead woman, and realized another woman had lain beneath her.
This one might still be alive.
I cursed myself and leaned back into the gap. When I worked her free, she groaned. Her eyes were rolled back to whites, which did not encourage me, but her ears were not bleeding, and there was no foam bubbling from her mouth.
Perhaps she would survive.
Dragging her out could not be helping whatever was wrong inside her body, but leaving the woman under the bricks seemed even more foolish. I began praying to the Lily Goddess-the closest I knew to Marya, whose protections had so obviously failed here.
I do not know these women, Goddess.
They are not of Your priestesses. They have probably never even heard Your name. They are hardly of blameless virtue, I am certain.
But if their goddess is not able to ease their passing, or bind their souls back to their bodies, I pray You can do this thing for them on her behalf.
If no one claims them, I will wash their bodies and paint the white and the red, in Your name. Better they should rise up and live longer, though.
Not much of a prayer, and smacked more of funeral rites than a healing chant, but it was what I could manage in the moment.
I laid the women out side by side. The first victim was beyond all hope. Even if the very spirit of the goddess took over her body, her face and neck were crushed. She would never breathe or eat, though somehow her brown hair still seemed rich as life. The second one, whose dark hair and freckled coloration suggested they might have been sisters, at least had found her breath.
Water spattered on me. I looked up for rain, but saw only silver light. The air tingled.
I realized the Lily Goddess had not only heard my prayers, She was answering them directly. In that moment, I was too exhausted to drop to my knees or show obeisance, so I sat back on my butt and impatiently awaited the divine.
Now I knew why no one had run to aid me. I was cloaked in the goddess’ glamour. I had witnessed this in Kalimpura, that only a few could see Her while most others knew nothing but echoing, chilly silence.
“I am here,” I announced. “You might as well get this over with.”
The Lily Goddess stepped out of a place between the air and the sky and smiled sadly at me. Much as with Blackblood, I saw someone who could have been mistaken for ordinary from a distance, except Her body fairly vibrated with power. My goddess was an explosion contained in the shape of a woman. Her hair was the color of all women, Her eyes shifted from gray to green to black to blue to violet to silver, all with the twisting flash of a windborne leaf in autumn. She was all sizes and shapes and ages, from gawky girl to matronly mother to withered crone.
She was all women.
“You never manifested so in the Temple of the Silver Lily,” I said softly. Always She was a wind, a rush of water, a voice possessing the Temple Mother.
Never before have I appeared to you.
Had I been standing, Her words would have driven me to my knees after all. Her lips moved, but the sounds did not quite match. That sense of power arced out of the goddess like water from a stormy sky. My loins went soft and wet, and I felt the first shudders of orgasm take me.
I knew that the tingle of power from the Eyes of the Hills I now carried was less than one of Her nail parings.
Though I tried to answer Her, my own words were muted.
You are Green.
All I could do was nod. That was like moving boulders with my neck. Pleasure arced through me, so intense it was painful, all the worse because I was not free to throw myself into the sensation.
You follow one of My daughters.
It was slowly penetrating to me that this was not the Lily Goddess. Another nod, more rocks dragged by the sheer force of my neck and head. Fluid rushed from my sweetpocket, as it could when a lover touched me just so for a time.
She stepped-if that could be the word-to the two women I had laid out.
My grandchild Solis is dead.
The woman with the crushed face seemed to sigh and settle. She had been lost to life already, but something more had just gone out of her. I clenched my thighs and tried to control myself, against the mad, mad pressure.
A titanic! The realization was so horrifying I wanted to flee into unconsciousness. If I could have stopped my heart to escape Her, I would have.
My grandchild Laris lives.
The surviving sister-if that was who they were, siblings-seemed to breathe easier, though still trapped in the awkward unconsciousness of the badly wounded.
The goddess turned back to the shattered temple. My breathing shuddered so hard I feared to choke. Then I prayed to choke.
My daughter is passed from the world.
The grief in Her voice was the mourning of the ocean for those mountains ground to sand along its beaches. She cried as the stars do for one of their number tumbled from the night sky to strike the earth. I wanted to die for Her loss, to lay myself down as a cloak over Her suffering, and spare Her even a beat of the anguish that threatened my very sanity.
In that moment, I saw for the first time what it might mean to be a god. Not power, but responsibility. Not awareness, but omniscience. Not emotion, but something so large it would shatter the human soul.
You know Me now.
“Yes, Mother,” I whispered, as though the words were drawn from me as with burning pincers. The fires of my lust were all but forgotten.
Your Lily Goddess is one of My daughters.
Desire.
The girl-child you carry is Mine, through your goddess.
Once again, my passion blinded me to sensibility. All I could think was to rise up in anger, ready to shout: You will not have my daughter! The flame of my rebellion, never truly doused, flared even under Her eternal burden of time, power, and sorrow. Nearly crushed beneath the majesty of Her titanic awareness so poorly contained in the swirling woman’s body She wore, I still had to laugh. Or tried to. By the Wheel, this was difficult.
“Blackblood told me…” I gasped. The words were birthing hard. “… that I would bear…” Another gasp. This was like lifting stones. “… a boy-child.” My mind leapt right past the obvious answer to those rare unfortunates born both man and woman in one conflicted body. Fool that I was, I did not want to know then what would come in time, what choices these prophecies would bring me.
Then She was gone without ever having been there. The wreckage was full of shouting men and crying women, while boys tugged at the beams and people swirled around me. No one seemed to take note of me, though several bent to attend to the two women I had rescued from beneath the rubble. I felt spent, as if a lover had used me hard through all the watches of the night, and forced me to orgasm far beyond the limits of either reason or passion. I knew I reeked of sex.
And fear. Sweat poured from me, even in the cold.
I could see why a woman might want to be a priestess of that goddess. I could see more why a woman would run screaming.
Laris, the survivor, opened her eyes and looked at me. She could not gain enough of herself to speak, but I saw that she knew, and that she understood that I knew.
I nodded to her, and touched my cap, mouthing the words We shall meet again.
Wrapped in the last of Desire’s glamour, I walked away unnoticed. My plans for the Eyes of the Hills were forgotten now, set aside in the rush of thought about what sort of power it took to slay a goddess. No wonder Erio had feared.
Anyone who could make such a death magic as to shatter the divine
could just as easily have shattered this city were they of a mind to do so. The fault lines that would likely issue from Marya’s fall might do it for them.
***
I found myself deeply disturbed by Desire’s intervention. Familiarity with the gods had lent me a dangerously casual attitude, but still, I have never grown easy with such encounters, then or in the time since. All through my life I have learned over and over the lesson that there is an order to the existence of the gods, just as there is an order to the lives of men. That I had known since my grandmother’s funeral at the beginning of my memories, and I would recall it until the day I was laid out with the white and the red painted upon my own face.
Having Her come to me so was as daunting a violation of the world as having my grandmother return from her burial platform in the sky to correct my words and deeds. Or worse, her grandmother.
The world’s grandmother.
This was not right.
During my time at the Factor’s house, I had been exposed to any number of books on the divine. They largely contained views of the gods as some historical aspect of the life of the city and its people. In those days the gods were still sleeping away the years under the somnolence of the Duke’s magic, so I suppose that had been deemed safe enough.
But even then, the Dancing Mistress had introduced me to the boy-priest Septio, who would later father my child. And Mother Iron, that chthonic force who seemed to me to perhaps be the soul of Copper Downs. Like Desire, a larger being wrapped in a smaller body. A woman sees a goddess much as a fish sees the fingers that drop food into its bowl-with no notion of the vastness looming beyond.
I did not deny the divine. For the love of all that was holy, I held regular conversations with the divine. I had made a god.
Desire had been something more. She was to the godhood of the Lily Goddess or Blackblood or Choybalsan or Endurance as they were to my personhood. It occurred to me just then how very odd it was that I had been on a first-name basis with four different gods and goddesses, when most of the priestesses in the Temple of the Silver Lily prayed all their lives for the simplest visitation from Her.