by Jay Lake
They could all carry one another down to the Smagadine hells so far as I was concerned. As for the Rectifier, I would keep him in reserve against Blackblood, as intended.
“Hello,” I said to Mother Vajpai.
“Green.” Her voice was sad, gentle, almost sweet. “It is time for you to come home.”
“I am home.” I backed a little farther away from the table and kept its width between me and her. The Rectifier and the two Revanchists remained seated, all three very much alert with claws extended. I wondered briefly if the Revanchists had any idea that humans existed who could stand toe to toe with their kind in a fight.
Mother Vajpai walked briskly around the left side of the table toward me, passing behind the Revanchists as well as Samma. Because this was my old teacher, for the second time in a few minutes I fought the urge to palm my knives-let her be the first to bare steel, if we were to be at blades. I kicked my chair back up and balanced it before me. Hours and hours of exercises with the Dancing Mistress had taught me much about how to use furniture as weapons and armor both, though some of that skill was useless now that I was pregnant.
Did Mother Vajpai know? She must, I realized, after raising and training more than a generation of Blades. The question was whether she would fight to kill my baby, intentionally or otherwise.
“Enough, Green,” she said in that teaching voice again. Still in stride, Mother Vajpai reached for my chair to toss it aside.
We were committed to the bout now.
As her hand grasped the chair rail, I lofted it with my foot, so the chair came up off the floor more swiftly than she had expected. Her arm followed. I stepped in with the momentum of my kick to land a strike with the side of my hand along her left ribs.
First touch!
Mother Vajpai took the blow with an audible crack, let herself slip away from me on the motion transferred from my hand to her body, and spun a low kick toward my ankles.
A cheap move, but effective. I had to jump off my already compromised stance to avoid tripping. As a result, I could not back away fast enough before she landed hard blows on my shoulders, trying to batter me down. I ducked below that and did a quick backwards roll. My impaired balance took me off target, which surprised both Mother Vajpai and me. Her next foot strike passed through the space where I should have been, while I bowled into a knot of watching men.
Hands grasped at me as I bounced to my feet. To stay on the floor would have been surrender-or death, in a slightly different fight. I swiftly tracked Samma, standing now as well; and the looming bulk of the Rectifier. Where was Surali?
In this room I had too many enemies and not enough allies. Spinning away from Mother Vajpai, I blurted to the Selistani watchers, “She would bring down the god Endurance!”
That was a weak arrow with which to move them to action, but I had no better ready and no time to think of one.
Even then, I’d distracted myself too long. Mother Vajpai was upon me with a swift rain of pulled blows. She meant to make me submit without actually disabling me. I ducked into them, accepting the punishment on my shoulders and upper arms, to drive my elbow into her hip.
That caused her to step back as the joint folded in reaction. I followed the hip blow with a feint to her gut and an open hand to her face. Much to my surprise, the face blow connected with a resounding smack and an arcing sheet of pain strongly suggesting I’d just seriously damaged a finger or two.
Mother Vajpai stopped moving to shake her head twice, sharply. Blood was running freely. Had I broken her nose?
Good!
I stole another moment to spot Surali. Around me the Selistani men were moving, though I could not yet tell if this was space-clearing, flight, or incipient riot. The Bittern Court woman stood just past the Rectifier, raising something in her hand to point toward me.
The only way to defeat someone about to shoot you was to run them down and hope they missed. I’d played this trick before. I kicked off, intending to smash Surali’s face for her trouble-let her negotiate the purchasing of unquiet deaths with a lopsided nose and missing teeth!
Mother Vajpai had recovered faster than I’d realized. She grabbed my elbow to swing me off my intended course. I stepped into the grapple she offered in doing that, and butted her damaged nose hard with my forehead. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the Rectifier’s hand close over Surali’s.
I pulled back from Mother Vajpai as she landed a slap on my ear that made my hearing echo dully. I tried for another head butt. She turned aside just slightly and I caught a shoulder in my sternum for my troubles.
That pushed me backwards, winded almost to the point of blacking out.
Mother Vajpai took advantage of my moment of incapacity to step away from the fight as well and put her hands to her face. Trying to set her nose, I presumed. A quick scan of the room showed me Surali on her knees. Tears streamed down the Bittern Court woman’s face, her hand still in the Rectifier’s grip. I owed him a thanks. Samma visibly nerved herself to step in, but I realized Mother Vajpai was waving the other Blade away with one hand even while the other still pressed against her own nose. My countrymen were hanging back to shout and wave fists.
By now most of the pardines in the room were on their feet. We were moments from a full-scale bar fight.
Wait… Something nagged at me. Why was Mother Vajpai keeping Samma from the sparring? Right now my old teacher desperately needed a foil to help her take me down.
I glanced at Samma again, then back at Mother Vajpai. Over the line of her hand, her eyes crinkled, even with unshed tears of pain glittering within them.
She was smiling at me, out of Surali’s line of sight.
Mother Vajpai had been fighting to lose. Already my body was in agony in half a dozen places, so her blows had been real enough. But she’d intended to lose to me.
Betrayals within betrayals. I nodded very slightly, just a tic of my chin, then rushed my old teacher hard. Her hand came down from her nose a fraction too slowly to block me, as I now knew it would. I slammed my shoulder into her chest, digging low and pushing up with the blow.
Mother Vajpai left her feet and slid backwards onto the now-empty table. Her head cracked loudly into the pardines’ stone bowl. I winced, but turned away, ignoring her and Samma both.
The Rectifier had pressed Surali to the floor. She was openly sobbing. I heard popping noises from her hand still clenched inside his fist. “We must leave,” I shouted in his ear.
“Should she survive?” he rumbled, his eyes flickering toward the Bittern Court woman.
“Yes,” I said, not even trying to weigh the benefits of having him kill her right here. This was not the Rectifier’s business. I wanted the Revanchists and the Selistani embassy to thwart one another, not launch an all-out war.
What if I gave him the Eyes of the Hills? Maybe, maybe, I told myself, but dismissed the thought for later consideration. Too much else occurring in the moment, too much else at stake. This was not the opportune time for important decisions.
The huge pardine dropped the Bittern Court woman’s right fist and swung his arms wide with a growl. The surging brawl inside the tavern made space for him and his wicked claws. I stepped close and kicked Surali hard in the chest, then stepped on her unhurt left hand, grinding my heel into her remaining unbroken fingers. Having someone spoon-feed her for a week or two might teach this one some humility.
Samma grabbed at my elbow as I turned to walk away. She almost got a faceful of knife blade for her trouble before I realized who it was. Her expression nearly stirred me to tears.
I followed the Rectifier out into the rainy night, cowering behind that broad back as the sounds of fighting faded behind us. Only the chilly, wet darkness welcomed me onward.
***
We found shelter inside an old grain wagon. This was a wooden box about eight feet high, seven feet wide, and twenty feet deep, down on its frame amid a jumble of junk and salvage in a narrow yard behind a wheelwright’s shop on Kraster Road.
I’d never seen the place before in my life, but the Rectifier led me there by a steady, purposeful circuit through the puddled streets, obviously designed to allow him to spot and throw off any pursuers.
When we’d reached the little yard, the Rectifier was satisfied we were alone. So was I. Climbing through the collapsed stacks of old scaffolding and cart axles and warped lumber was educational. I had no idea someone as massive as he could so effectively squirm through such apparently tiny gaps.
Inside stank of mold and rot, but it was dry, and relatively clean. A small alcohol stove and a bedroll bespoke frequent occupation, though I wasn’t sure the Rectifier was the sort to bother with such niceties.
“This is your place?” I was still breathing hard from the fight at the Tavernkeep’s. My ribs were grinding with a sharp, discouraging pain. When had Mother Vajpai hit me so? I examined my right hand, which promised some marvelous bruising. All my knuckle bones were intact, somewhat to my surprise. I began idly exploring my mouth with my left index finger, wondering if any teeth were loosened from the head butts I’d delivered.
“I use it,” he growled. He added a few words in the flowing language of the pardines, which I had rarely heard spoken. I could not say if it was a blessing, a curse, or something else entirely.
Mumbling around my finger, I answered, “I need to check myself for serious injuries. Then I must ask your patience to hear me out on something.”
The Rectifier eased himself to the floor. He had not fought, much, but he moved as if something bothered him. Had he been in an earlier combat? “We will stay here this evening. My time is yours, until either one of us passes into sleep.”
“Mmm.” I finished exploring my mouth, then took inventory of my other hurts. Several good-sized lumps on my head, but the worst was definitely the damage to my ribs. There didn’t seem to be much I could do now except wrap them. I proceeded to do that with fabric torn from the lining of my stolen coat.
Eventually I eased down onto the floor next to the Rectifier and covered myself with the bedroll he seemed to be ignoring. If there were bedbugs about, they would have to work very hard for my attention this night.
“I need your help,” I finally said.
“Mmm.” He appeared to be asleep, his breath wheezing through his muzzle in irregular time. I knew from the set of his ears that the Rectifier was still listening.
“I am trying to shut myself of the gods in my life. Blackblood has designs upon my unborn daughter. I am being visited by a titanic. I have even come to doubt the value of my connection with the Lily Goddess and Her servants my sisters, as they are allied with my enemies.” Or seem to be. Mother Vajpai’s fighting to lose weighed on my mind.
One pale eye flicked briefly open. “You are human. Those are human gods. I have no wisdom for you there.”
“I am human, and they are human gods, but they afflict me like chancres on a beggar’s mouth.” I tried and failed to keep the bitterness from my voice. “I am no priest to be ridden for a god’s horse.”
This time both eyes flicked open. “No priest, mmm?” His tone conveyed laconic amusement.
“No. And I will be shut of their influence.”
“I do not believe your gods can be shut out, like a door latched against the weather.”
“Something must be done.” My frustration bubbled. “I am taking my life back from the influence of the divine. Divine influenza, more like it. Gods slide into a person’s thoughts until their choices fall away.”
A long silence; then, in a slow rumbling, almost a many-worded sigh, “This has what to do with me?”
“Nothing. Everything.” I paused, collecting my thoughts. Rain drummed on the wagon’s roof, sounding like voices raised in the distance. “I ask not from responsibility but from friendship. You have dealt with more priests than I can count. As allies, as enemies, as targets, as obstacles to be overcome. I would deal with a god, remove his power from my life. It seems to me that you know something of this.”
The Rectifier sat up. From the floor he gathered a rag and began carefully polishing his claws one by one, extending then cleaning them. “You are being foolish, Green,” he said slowly. “Human gods are needed for those with human powers and human problems. Each people worships according to their needs.”
I wondered whose needs the Urges had met, in the darkness before the morning of the world. I wondered whom in turn the titanics had served, besides their own prodigious appetites and strange lusts. A pardine theory of godhood, perhaps, for all that they didn’t seem to have gods as I understood the concept.
“Human gods I have aplenty,” I replied. “I wish fewer of them in my life. You know I will not cast aside Endurance, could not do so even if pressed. I just wish to shut certain doors. Block certain powers. You possess that might and that talent.”
“Might?” He snorted, an almost human laugh. I had never heard the Dancing Mistress do so. “I can stand to fight against a dozen men and walk away intact. I can scale cliffs, swim rivers, and bear down against the weapons of prayer like a warm spoon through cold grease. But I am not mighty. And certainly not against your human gods.”
“You chop logic.” I struggled to keep my voice from becoming sullen. It would serve me no purpose at all to whine at my hoped-for ally. “I know your reputation among priests is infamous. I have seen you stand before the wrath divine unconcerned.”
He rumbled a low noise I could not parse. Then: “Do not confuse foolish bravery with might and power.”
“Still, these gods do not touch you as they touch me.”
“Of course not. You have a soul.”
“And you have a soulpath.” I stared at him in the glimmering darkness of the grain wagon, though all I could see was the flash of his eyes and the folded shape of his power. The soulpath was an aspect of pardine theology and spirituality of which I had only a tenuous grasp, even with the Dancing Mistress’ various patient efforts at explanation. Their kind were born into a family or tribe or grouping-I did not even know that word in Petraean, translation for whatever they called themselves in their own tongue. Each new pardine was feasted into the soulpath of their people. A collective soul, perhaps. Or a herd soul, every individual contributing what was needful and taking what was required, while the whole never lost its collective identity.
Pardines shared a connection with one another and among their people that flowed much deeper than anything humans could lay claim to. Twins, perhaps, such as Iso and Osi, could touch something of the sort. Not the greater run of us.
“I walk a soulpath.” His agreement was almost grudging. “Some among my people would tell you I have strayed.”
“The Revanchists?” I paused, tasting my next thought before I laid it out for him. “They seem concerned with purity. I have known humans of their sort. It’s a petty philosophy.”
“They think me lost,” the Rectifier admitted. “Too long I have hunted among your kind. Any longtime hunter takes on an aspect of their prey.”
I tried to imagine the Rectifier as a human priest. The necessary focus and dedication to a god seemed so terribly unlike him. He did not have that strange gift for embracing contradiction that every priest I knew seemed to contain. To follow a god was to follow improbabilities. How could such a thing as Skinless walk the earth? Of what fabric did the Lily Goddess wreak the miracle of her appearances? How did Endurance manifest, even at my call and with the power I’d harnessed in that moment?
This was the true point of Iso and Osi’s stories, of the Rectifier’s strange ideas about godhood and need, of Desire’s grief as She passed through the world of Her daughter-goddesses. The concerns of gods were beyond me.
All I really wanted now was to be beyond them, and to take my growing daughter safely with me into that refuge. “I have been hunted by gods,” I told him. “I doubt they have much taken on my aspect. It is from their predations I would remove myself.”
“You still struggle with Blackblood.”
“Yes,” I said, some
what surprised that he understood this.
“Your gods mean little to me, Green.” The Rectifier’s voice was grave. “You risk being a great fool in acting so against your nature. But I will stand beside you against Blackblood if you ask it of me.”
“I shall not stop you from your knucklebone harvest,” I said.
He rumbled another almost-laugh. “No, that you shall not do.”
With that we sank into a quiet that in turn descended into troubled sleep, at least for me, under the staccato rain on our temporary wooden roof.
***
Morning brought chilly air that recalled all too well winter’s frosts. My hand was a bit swollen, but the fingers had retained their flexibility. The less said of my ribs, the better, though I doubted they were actually broken. I could breathe without screaming. My belly felt bigger, as if my child had grown overnight. Also, I was hungry beyond the point of ravenous. No food would be safe from me until I was sated.
The Rectifier roused as soon as I began to stir. “Do you have a plan to fight the gods?” he asked quietly. “Or will you simply continue to move faster than everyone else and trust your weapons as always?”
“I cannot carry a blade large enough to slit the throat of a god,” I replied. “And besides, I must eat first.”
“I have cured meat.”
He sounded oddly diffident, which I realized was the Rectifier’s way of being polite. “No, thank you. I feel an urgent hunger for cardamom rolls, actually.”
Though I would not risk heading over to Lyme Street with him in tow. We would be too easily recognized-there were not two like the Rectifier, at least not in Copper Downs. Nor me, either. Surely I could find a bakery here somewhere in the brewery district where so much yeast was used that the air always smelled like spoiled dough, and secure some warm treat or another to carry me through my hunger. Once more I longed for a kitchen of my own.
“As you please.” He began shredding long-shanked strips of meat with his fangs. I found myself curiously unwilling to ask what animal had been slaughtered and cured to make his snack. I was afraid the answer would be too unpleasant for even me.