by Jay Lake
He paused awhile, as if thinking through his next words. Erio was a ghost a thousand years older than the Factor, I was sure, but the Factor had lived centuries longer than any man might expect, which lent him an unusual substance in the afterlife. How that experience bore upon his thoughts, I could not say. It must have granted him an involuntary wisdom at the least.
Finally, the Factor spoke. “I will not bandy with you about Mother Iron. She is much older than even the farthest extent of my knowledge.”
“I do not believe she is so much more ancient than the sorcerer-engineers.”
“Tinkering fools,” he said dismissively. “Boys toying with brass and wire. Mother Iron is something else. Older. Deeper. ”
“I have seen you in her company.”
“Yes…”
“I would speak with her.”
“She does not respond when bidden.”
“Unlike ghosts?” I asked, my voice nasty. “I never believe what people say. Not when they act the opposite. You can find her. Bring her to me.”
“Even for me, it does not work that way.” Something of a smile played across his face. “My powers are far more limited than you seem willing to credit.”
“I have no idea what your powers are, in truth. Not here in this place, at this stage of your existence. I just know you have a bond to Mother Iron.”
At this latest mention of her name, Mother Iron stepped up to my other side. Her furnace eyes glowed as if from a deep distance. As always, I received the impression that her cowl concealed immensities far larger than the space it enclosed.
“Welcome,” I said modestly.
I received an indifferent stare for my troubles.
“I am hurrying to defeat a plot against this city.”
The Factor snickered, I swear he did. Mother Iron only continued to stare. The fires in those deep-set eyes were not even shuttered by a moment’s blinking.
“Another god will be stricken soon, if we do not move. And…” Here I took a breath, readying myself to play the strange card that had occurred to me earlier. “I know how to restore you to a portion of your former power.”
That was a knife throw in the dark if I’d ever taken one, but all the same, not unreasonable. Something flared in her eyes. It was the opposite of a blink, as if the fires within had been unbanked to briefly rage beneath a rain of oil.
A hit, then.
I used my own silence. Not as a weapon against her, for I could no more fight Mother Iron than I could fight a storm, but as a tool. A lever, cracking her open.
“You do not have that authority,” she finally said. As it had always seemed to do, her voice gusted deep from within a large, hollow place, bringing oven-hot air with the words.
“No, but I know of one who does. Here in Copper Downs, now.”
“Her…”
The Factor’s ghost looked both bemused and puzzled in the same moment. His lips parted as if he wished to speak, but at a sharp glance from me he swallowed whatever he had planned to say. Even the ghosts feared me.
“Yes,” I replied to Mother Iron. “Her. And She speaks to me. You remember Her, from the beginning, don’t you?”
Mother Iron sighed, a rumbling that reminded me of the collapse of a mound of coal. “Not the very beginning, no. But yes. I remember.”
“The days of the titanics. You are no daughter-goddess, or splinter of that era.” My thoughts ran ahead, dragging my words with them through fields of theory and foggy banks of speculation. “You are from another creation, spawn of another Urge. Much as the pardine gods were.”
“You presume.” Mother Iron’s voice was hard, but carried no threat.
“I only speculate. But you have persevered, borne upon the prayers of sorcerer-engineers and existing within the echoing places of this undercity. Carried along into the currents of time without ever recovering your proper place in the depths.”
“Vanity is for men.” Her objection carried its own weakness embedded in the tone and power of the words.
“Vanity is for all things that carry self behind their eyes. Gods are vain, men are vain, cats are vain. But this is not vanity.” I pitched my voice for her, ignoring the Factor’s increasingly sardonic smile. “This is opportunity.”
Mother Iron’s tone changed. Words creaked as if bouncing down a mountain. “What would you of me?”
“Accompany me to meet Desire. Accept Her charge if She will lay it upon you. Then cloak Her power in yours and help me to stop the god killers that hunt Desire’s daughters across the plate of the world. When we are finished, you will have stature again.”
“Or my fires will be banked forever.”
“All opportunity is risk.” I opened the aching, stinging hand I’d slashed to summon the Factor’s ghost. Blood dripped. “Everything worthwhile comes priced too high for our tastes. This is the way of the world, Mother Iron. Live in it. Or hide beneath the shadows.”
I had no better offer to make her. Either she accepted my argument or she did not. In any case, my evening called me, a midnight appointment to be at blades with the forces of my chief tormentor.
Mother Iron made a slow, steaming noise, like a kettle on the hob. Then, to my surprise: “Take me to Her. I would see this power for myself.”
“Of course.” I glanced once more at the Factor’s ghost. He mouthed the word vanity at me. I nodded at him as if accepting a compliment.
Even now, that would gall him. Being dead, his amusements were few. My refusal to be baited was salt in his never-healing wounds.
***
Walking Below with Mother Iron was very different. There was no sense of menace. I was one of the most dangerous human beings in the city, but the denizens of Below were their own class of risk. Nothing stirred when Mother Iron walked those dank halls.
I carried my coldfire always as any sane person did Below, at least any sane person who relied on her vision to navigate. Mother Iron’s burning gaze swept the darkness ahead of her with a vague orange glow. That was a bit unnerving. The light caught on things I did not usually notice, given that I’d never been Below with a torch or open flame. Glittering compound eyes tucked into the vaults and arches beneath which we passed, for example. Narrow slits of shadow at waist and shoulder height, primed for traps or hidden bowmen to fire through. Chips of bone scattered along the edges of the floors, as if whoever had died down here over the years had lain too long for even the scavengers.
I ignored these things, for they did not threaten me this day. Even the close and stale air fled before her approach. We followed the Sheep’s Head Cutoff, then picked up the Whitetop Street sewer line to approach the Temple Quarter from Below. I wasn’t sure how comfortable or safe Mother Iron would be walking the street openly.
Which was, admittedly, not my trouble to resolve.
“We will emerge at the grate behind the Shrine of Indulgences,” I said, breaking the silence that had followed us since we had left the Factor’s ghost behind. “That’s about two blocks from the ruins of Marya’s temple.”
Mother Iron turned her head toward me, but said nothing. I’d already begun to doubt my plan-fusing an old power outside the purview and descent of the titanics with Desire’s daughter-descent. An analogue of how I’d called Endurance into being, really, sidestepping one set of problems by folding them into another.
But I’d made Endurance, for all practical purposes. Mother Iron came with centuries-millennia-of her own power, her own traditions, her own fate. For that matter, so did Desire.
I realized I was like a child who imagines two leaves and a stick to be the same as a boat, fit to sail filled with cargo and men down a rushing river to the infinite sea. I had done a simple thing, terrible and portentous as it was, in raising Endurance into the world. Now I proposed to do a far more complex thing.
We reached the grate I expected. I looked up into the gloom of late afternoon sullen through the bars at the top of the ladder. “Follow,” I told Mother Iron, not knowing if that was a comma
nd, a request, or wishful thinking.
I climbed. These rungs were metal, sunk into the dressed stone of the shaft. Pitted, corroded, mossy, they stung slightly at the palms of my hands. Still I reached the top and clambered out. The sleet had given way to fat, slow snow once again. I could tire very quickly of winter, I realized. Especially when it was me forced to race about in all weathers at all hours.
Looking down, I saw Mother Iron climbing like a furnace on legs. It would not have shocked me had she simply risen up the shaft, but her hands-such as they were, hidden in the folds of her robe-and her feet brought her up into daylight just as anyone else’s would have been forced to do.
When she came out to the surface, I noted how the snowflakes sizzled and popped when they landed on her. I’d only ever seen her in sunlight once before-the day we’d stood off Choybalsan and slain the god, along with my old friend and enemy Federo. One body, two minds. Or so I had told myself.
She was squat as ever. I imagined a walking stove, though Mother Iron certainly appeared to possess the usual number of arms and legs. That cowl was just as deep in daylight. It still seemed to contain far more space than its outside dimensions would suggest. Even the cloth of her cloak was oddly textured, as if it had been fabricated of metal, or at least pounded on an anvil instead of woven on a loom.
No one was about in the alley except for a three-legged dog rooting through spilled garbage. With a grunt, I flipped the grate back into place. Then we headed toward the ruins of the temple.
Mother Iron still said nothing.
***
As we approached the Temple of Marya, I noticed that the few other people out in the last daylight amid the increasingly foul weather avoided us. They passed by the other side of the street, walking in long careful curves that took no notice of who was approaching. Just as people will avoid a madwoman in the road without remarking on her.
Or a Blade, trained by deicides, skulking to avoid the notice of a goddess.
They were stepping around Mother Iron, of course. I wasn’t certain what her seeming was for other people. Sometimes the avatars and godlings of this city moved cloaked in invisibility, much as Skinless himself could apparently roam with discretion despite his enormous size and horrifying visage.
Unease, it could just be unease.
We reached the jumble of bricks and shattered timber. Snow and sleet had alternated sufficiently to make a gray-brown slush of the ruins. That was now being overwritten by more freezing rain dumping even as we stood. My earlier offerings were gone, no doubt scavenged by whoever had passed here since I’d taken Laris back to the lazaret on Bustle Street.
“Here,” I said to Mother Iron, then stepped up onto my ragged chunk of masonry, which had served me as both lectern and altar. “Third time pays for all.”
“Nothing pays for all,” she rumbled.
A joke? Couldn’t be. “Can you climb up here with me?”
Her joints popped with an audible metallic echo as she stretched to top the rock. Once again, up close to her, I was struck by how hot Mother Iron was. Snow and slush at her feet sizzled to water, then flowed away.
Looking back across the years, I now know that this was one of the better ideas I had ever had. At the time I was nearly panicked at the potential for disaster.
“Desire,” I said, shivering. “Goddess.” I reached into my vest and pulled out the last of the jewelry I’d stolen earlier. So much for hocking it for spending money. I scattered the rings and earrings on the ground. They disappeared into the snow, leaving only dark little holes. “I call You once more, this time the last. I have brought You an answer, someone who can stand against the Saffron Tower and those who would avenge the insults they have pursued since the first days of Time himself.”
I closed my eyes and thought of Marya, the Lily Goddess, Laris, Mother Vajpai, the fat woman at the lazaret, Ilona, and least of all-or perhaps most of all-myself. Women. Goddesses. Desire’s daughters and granddaughters.
Everyone who’d served Her, and needed Her, and been under Her protection.
A traitor thought demanded my attention, distracting me. Is Mother Iron female?
That was between the two of them. “Desire,” I said aloud again. “I offer a solution to the problem which has dogged You down the generations. Raise up a goddess from a different path to power, and face those who persecute You with a different weapon in your hand.”
I do not use weapons, She whispered more quietly than snow thunder. Her voice was the wind.
Not Laris this time. Though my mouth once again tasted of metal. “You are leaving us already.”
It costs much for Me to appear.
“Then see this one I bring before You. An ancient protector of the city. A woman of a different era and kind. A power in this land, who can close the divine fracture in this place before it grows too wide. Mother Iron, I present the titanic Desire. Desire, I present the autochthonic Mother Iron.”
I felt as if I’d gone to some dinner party of the gods, and made introduction between two rival thunderbolt hurlers.
Wind swirled around us, much as it had in the Temple of the Silver Lily when the Lily Goddess had manifested. Snow crystals flew up from the broken stones, or were drawn down from the sky, until we stood in the core of a frozen vortex. Mother Iron steamed as the stuff melted from her cloak on contact. I felt myself becoming buried. Strangely, my body was now blessedly blood-warm.
The wind took the shape of a woman-familiar, pulsating, shifting through all women, all races of human, all shapes and heights. You would be My daughter-goddess? She asked in a voice made of this private storm.
“No,” said Mother Iron. In her word I heard rusted metal doors slamming shut, cutting off ovens full of screaming souls, burning charnel houses blocked from view. “I would protect this city.”
The storm gusted, sighed with lungs the size of clouds, the shape of fate. Do you deny Me?
“No.” Again, a clang of finality. But these were immortals bargaining over divine power. Likely their words carried meanings far beyond what my ear could understand. “I do not deny you. But neither am I a daughter of your line.”
Not human. Not of the titanic descent.
Were we ourselves sprung from the gods? I laid that thought aside for future consideration alongside other troubling ideas.
The storm hummed further. Mother Iron reached out, her cloak slipping from one bony hand so that I saw fingers like metal pistons, a wrist motivated by chain and pin and axle. Was she quite literally a machine? Who had made her? Perhaps Archimandrix’s first and greatest ancestor.
“I will take your charter, but I will not bow to your high place.”
“Exactly,” I hissed. “Step outside the ancient feud.”
Now the storm laughed. The very air shook. The stones beneath my feet seemed to slip, ready to walk of their own accord. So finally it is time for a change.
They came together then, in that vasty place I had only barely ever glimpsed, where time echoed like a stone dropped in a well and the world was the size of a fingertip. I watched as the forces met. Goddess and tulpa swirled together as the water of two different seas will where they merge, until only ocean remains, ever changing and endlessly unchanged.
Finally, after seconds, after an eternity, the two pulled apart again. All the hair on my body smoldered. My eyes felt as if lightning had danced within them. I did not know if I would survive this experience, and found I did not care.
Instead I dropped to my knees. “Mother…” I whispered.
The hand that reached for me was not quite the same. I could see the mottled, corroded metal, but it flexed beneath a form that gained density even as I looked. Skin, the opposite of Skinless really. Though on Mother Iron it seemed to be just another cloak. Still, rosy nails and a hue almost as brown as my own showed where before there had been only in truth an ancient, creaking machine.
“Rise,” she said. Her voice was still distant ovens and banked fires, but now it came from bowed
lips that I could just barely glimpse within the shadows of her cowl. If she were to pull back her hood, Mother Iron would be both beautiful and terrifying in the same moment.
I stood. We were in the street, myself bone-cold and soaking. The bricks of Marya’s shattered temple lay arrayed around us in a circle, like straw in a field after a whirlwind. No, not a circle. A spiral. With Mother Iron and myself at the center.
Already the joyous transports that had taken me up were fading. Already my sense of captivation was transforming to a sense of having been captive. All of this was about freeing myself from gods, not binding myself closer.
At least I had served the women of this city well, as a Lily Blade should.
“I am not yours.” My voice was quiet.
“All women are mine,” she answered. “But you serve others.”
“I do. And I must rouse more of them.”
“Do what you need. This is my temple now. I shall abide until it is time.”
Reluctantly, I walked away. A part of me wanted to hate her. I imagined nursing a resentment and a sense of blind folly that would push this force away from me. But another part of me wondered how it might feel to have the whole of Below, the entire undercity, as your sacred place, then be folded down into a smaller and smaller package until you fit into a spiral of bricks in some back alley.
Like a bird descended from the high airs and a wide view of the plate of the world to sit in one tree and think small thoughts. Would I have chosen the same?
No, of course not. I had refused this exact choice, turned away from this opening of the mind and soul. It would have torn me apart surely as any coney in the talons of some great falcon. Mortal women were not meant to be vessels of such power.
I hurried through the evening’s sleet and freezing rain. It was a proper storm, too, much to my disgust. The Tavernkeep’s place abided, awaiting my small pleasure as my choices narrowed toward nothing. The midnight hour would bring me to some end.