by Jay Lake
The natives of Kalimpura did not need to go see the world. The world came to them. All you required here was a good seat and a cool drink. Eventually everyone would pass by your corner.
My favorite times were within the dormitory. I had always slept alone before my time there, but the Blade aspirants slept together. We shared a room with mats spread out on a floor covered with thick straw slabs. At first, Samma was my bedmate, just to see me through the routine, but it took me no time at all to crave the circle of her arms at night.
We were not yet at the point of playing at lovers, but some of the older girls did. Jappa and Rainai would spread themselves wide in the moonlight from our dormitory’s single high window and explore each other with moaning abandon. Samma and I would sit side by side and watch them until we grew bored with the business and giggled ourselves to sleep.
All the girls were close, though, even outside those moonlit trysts. We tended each other’s hurts, mended each other’s robes, and sat turn by turn when someone took a fever or a flux or a grippe. What Little Kareen had said about me being a tiger from a cage weighed much on my mind, so I tried to laugh easily, take little offense, and ration my words until I knew the substance of whatever took place. These girls had lived together all their lives, after all, while I was still new to the company of anyone other than Mistress Tirelle.
In those hours, I found my anger had sought a level of its own. The fire within was never gone, but where it used to be a stream washing over me, now it was a deep pool. I knew where it was, and I knew it would find me again, but there was a sense of peace I hadn’t really known before, except for a few glimpses aboard Southern Escape when I had first fled Copper Downs.
Even the fear was mostly gone. The first night Samma’s kisses turned to me in earnest, that fear melted completely as our hands locked and my hips began to shiver.
For a while, at least, anger stayed away.
Mother Vishtha trained us in what she called “the black work.” She was quite pleased with my abilities at climbing, falling, and moving in nearly absolute darkness. “The Blades are doing many things,” she told me one night on the roof of an empty warehouse down by the waterfront after the two of us had scaled the outside wall. “Some of them are to be swaggering with bared steel. Many more are to be quiet.”
“Breaking into houses?”
“Well, more usually we are entering places of business. We are not thieves.” She sniffed. “You would be surprised how often people are finding it seemly to conceal certain records from us. So there is being a steady need for retrieving files, account books, and the like. It is generally considered very helpful if the Blade doing the work can understand the purpose of her job.”
“Cuts down on the mistakes, I’d imagine.”
“Oh, yes. And you are being a natural at buildings. With your, eh, facial features, you are soon to be doing the black work, I think. I will be showing you the small havens, so you know where to find help and safety if there is being trouble. You will stand out almost too much by daylight. Only in the night will you ever be moving secretly.”
“Or beneath a mask,” I said.
“Or beneath a mask. Though that challenges the dignity of our order.”
“Mmm.”
She stood close. “I am being told you are blooded.”
“Blooded?”
“That you have claimed a life,” she added.
“Two,” I said shortly. I had long since resolved never to discuss my role in the fall of the Duke of Copper Downs, not among these people, nor anywhere else.
“There are being times when the black work is claiming a life by stealth.”
“Murder by night.”
Mother Vishtha refused to be needled. “Only at need.”
“I… I killed once in desperation. And once in self-defense.” The Duke had been dead before I ever touched him.
“Green,” she said gently. “You are even now being a child of only thirteen summers. There are men grown and under arms who could not do those things.”
“I shamed myself and my teachers.” As I said those words, I realized that they were true. However false my upbringing, the Mistresses of the Factor’s house were my teachers, each true in her way.
“There is no shame in doing the Goddess’ work. Here in Kalimpura, it is being the Blades who extract payments for the Death Right. Her work. Our work.”
Anger gathered like clouds against the sun. “I am to climb in the window of some shopkeeper and stab him at his stool?”
“Perhaps. If that man killed his brother to take control of the family business, then refused to stand before his guild and court to answer for it.”
I could see the sense of what she said. In Kalimpuri terms, that was justice. Kill without honoring the Death Right, and you were called to account. Conceal the deed or try to dodge the consequences, in time your accounting would come for you with interest. At the point of a Lily Blade.
There was other work, too. Some of it stood outside the peculiar framework of justice in this city. People to be reminded of their obligations, heirlooms and treasures to be removed from one locked room and placed within another, fractious individuals to be brought back to their place in the order of things.
“A bad man in need of justice…”
“Listen,” she said. “The Blades do not decide. They only take action. You might not know that a man was bad, or why. You might see only a smiling father holding his babe by candlelight, and think, This is what I have lost. How can I take him from his child?
“The Lily Blades hold this responsibility before the courts of Kalimpura for a reason. Men are not able to set aside their hearts as women can do. If you follow this course, you will be the hand of the Goddess, and your heart will be Hers.”
At those words, I felt a swirl of air around me. My hair stirred as if fingers tugged through it. Words murmured just outside my hearing might have promised salvation or damnation or something else altogether.
Her mention of children awoke me to what might be. I had sworn childish oaths to stop the taking of babies from their families as had been done to me, yet I lived now in a city where half the children on the street were someone’s property-bondservants, apprentices, or outright slaves. My own people did not consider it an offense that a child be sold at need, or even a whim.
Goddess, I prayed with words inside my thoughts. I am the daughter of no house. Not even Yours. Even so, I will follow Your path awhile, if it will join with mine. I wish to strike at those who would take the youngest for toys and mules. If this is Your justice, so let it be mine.
The wind stilled. I received no other answer. I found my anger quenched, which might have been a reply. Mother Vishtha looked at me expectantly.
“I will choose this path,” I said dutifully.
She nodded. We climbed over the decorative parapet to descend to the alley below. I had not realized until then that my fists were tightly clenched. When I opened them, a crushed lily bud tumbled out of each to the tiles of the warehouse roof.
Mother Vishtha had already gone before me, and did not see the sending of the Goddess. I made no mention to her, but my heart was filled with a peculiar joy. Neither did I mention the matter of the flowers to Mother Vajpai.
The next year or so ran before me in this way. There were no more touches from the Goddess, but I knew She was there, just as I might know a bruise was present on my arm even if it did not ache. I caught up to my training within the Petals of the Blade, so that I was equal to or ahead of Samma. This was just, as I was a year her senior. Our affairs of the nighttime blossomed with our bodies, and Jappa called the two of us to her bed together for a while to be taught even more. We fought, too, as I had come to understand that girls will. The moon pulled at each of us in a different way, and the Goddess informed each of our hearts in our own manner.
Making up could be so very sweet.
I taught northern cooking in the temple kitchens to all who would listen. For a while, ther
e was talk of opening a bakery for the breads and sweetmeats I showed them, but that came to little. I practiced weapons and violence, killing dogs for the practical experience of puncturing a body; learning to shoot with bow, crossbow, and spear-thrower. In this, I was becoming far more dangerous to others than I was to myself. I carried my pigsticker with me everywhere outside the dormitory, as the sworn Blades did.
On my free hours, I watched the children of the city, and learned what I could of the different forms of bonding and hiring and selling. Human traffic varied as widely as the practices of the courts and guilds and castes themselves. I despaired of ever reaching a true understanding of Kalimpura. I took to keeping a great set of lists, modeled after the heraldries of Copper Downs, in an effort to track this. Mother Vajpai found my obsession with authority very amusing.
“It is being the taint of the Stone Coast in your blood,” she told me one day in the temple library as I sulked over a wide sheepskin parchment I’d been scratching on with colored inks. “Those northerners have the strange idea that authority should be invested in one man. What if he is being too much corrupted? Or his wits crack? As all stands on a single throne, so all falls on a single throne.”
“We have a Prince of the City.” I pointed to a sigil of a little crown at the top of my drawing.
“Your drafting hand is being most comely, dear,” Mother Vajpai said. She stroked the short ragged mess that was my hair, for I always kept it so nowadays. “But the Prince of the City rules no one and nothing. He is being there as face of Kalimpura for those foreigners who cannot believe we are not savages without they are seeing some crowned head.”
“Yet his name is on our trade treaties and guild charters.”
“The poor dear has to be doing something with his time.”
I ran my hands down the parchment. There were the courts, which were not so hard to understand. I saw them as little governments within the city, responsible for groups of people rather than tracts of land in the northern fashion. The guilds were more troublesome. The word was misleading, for it did not hold quite the same sense as the Petraean word used in translation. They controlled their trades, to be sure, but they held sway far more than that-for example, ruling over disputes that occurred on streets where their trading houses or factories were located. Castes were responsible for certain trades as well, and also ruled over individual families. One could be sponsored to join a guild, for example, but had to be born into a caste. The courts functioned much like a caste for the very wealthy and powerful, but one could be sponsored into them as well, which made them more like a guild.
“Everyone is doing something with their time.” I rolled up the parchment. “No one is idle in Kalimpura. Not even the smallest beggar child.”
“Nor the most contentious Aspirant to the Blades of the Lily.” Her hand pressed hard into my shoulder. “You will never truly be a Kalimpuri, Green. You are fitting better with time, though.”
“I am Selistani,” I told her quietly. “These are my people, even if I am not one in their eyes.”
“We are all daughters of the Goddess.”
The last Petal of the Blade came in my fourteenth summer. Jappa had recently sworn to the Blades and left our dormitory. Rainai was preparing to follow her. The next oldest girl was Chelai, who struggled with her head for heights and poor strength of arm, and so might never take the vows. Then me.
I was not the newest, either, for two little ones had come from the temple nursery. Ello and Small Rainai, aged four and five summers, were not much older than I had been when first taken to the Factor’s house. I spent time with them, trying to see the girl I had been in their little round faces. At first, they were frightened of my scars, but we became friends of a sort.
When one, or sometimes both, of them cried late in the night, it was my bed they came to. Samma would roll away from my shoulder with a grumpy sigh as the little girls squirmed in. Comforting them was more than anyone had ever done for me.
All I could learn of their history was that Ello had been a foundling at the Ivory Door. No one would speak to me of Small Rainai, but from scarce hints, I decided that she had been taken from a scene of violence. Our doing or someone else’s, I did not know, but I kept thinking of Mother Vishtha’s words about a father and his babe by candlelight.
We were ten for a while, until Rainai moved on. All I lacked was my last Petal, and the seasoning to follow it, before I could join her and Jappa in rooms kept by the Lily Blades-scenes of raucous riot and debauch, if the mealtime gossip from the Mothers of the other orders was to be believed.
Given how we passed our nights in our dormitory, I was become quite curious as to what it would be like to live among the full Blades.
One day Mother Vajpai called me out of a lecture on dockside rules and the etiquette of trading captains. This was the month of Shravana, which would be the beginning of August back in Copper Downs-even after two years here, I had to make a conscious effort to keep track of the Kalimpuri calendar. The day was brass-hot, much as I recalled from my earliest youth. Even within the Temple of the Silver Lily, where the architecture drew the warmest air upward, the air was beastly.
I’d spent more time aboard ships than everyone else in the lecture room combined, including ancient Mother Ashkar of the justiciars who was holding forth, but I knew that was not the same as bargaining with a captain. My experience lent me a sense of easy contempt for a subject that truly should have been interesting. That contempt, even in its wrongness, had mixed with the heat to make me irritated and distractible.
In short, I was glad enough to leave the little room and walk.
“Mother,” I said, folding my hands as initiates of the temple did to greet one another and honor the Goddess.
She returned the sign. “Green.”
Though some of the patience so carefully beaten into me by Mistress Tirelle had left me with my monthly flows, I still knew enough to follow Mother Vajpai and wait for her to speak.
To my surprise, she led me out a side door and onto Six Chariots Street. We moved into the currents of traffic. I contrasted what I perceived now with the mob I had seen on first arriving in Kalimpura. Then it had been all shouting tradesmen and lowing beasts and a great stream of people; now I understood them as threats, as powers, as problems and opportunities.
Here was a line of children from the Upper Sweeper caste, with their saltgrass brooms and brightly dyed sacks. Their caste had sole rights to the dung of certain animals, and these would not hesitate to shriek theft if some beggar made off with a handful of elephant scat. A trader from the Court of Herons passed, his silver bird clasp affixed to the crown of his hat to show his privileges in glass and food beyond three days fresh, with a brace of swaggering guards from the Street Guild following behind to protect the coin and papers on his person. Beyond him were a pair of fruit-sellers enmeshed in an argument concerning whose cart took precedence in the roadway.
In two years, I’d learned to read all these people, and almost everyone else around them. The foreign, the foolish, and the lost stood out to my eye like candles in a cistern. Much as I must have done to Little Kareen on my arrival, and to everyone who cared to look my way when I first passed the walls after he expelled me.
Perhaps this was what Mother Vajpai meant for me to see: that I belonged here among these people.
She led me by a wandering route down to the Avenue of Ships. That was the dockside leg of the route that otherwise circled inside Kalimpura’s walls. As always, it was lined on the seaward side with a thicket of masts and bowsprits and the occasional smokestack. The landward side was a mass of warehouses, office fronts, trading carts, booths, stalls, windows, and the everpresent throng of people.
“There is a ship in.” Mother Vajpai pitched her voice in that manner we trained for in the temple, which made us hard to overhear.
She had finally found the borders of my patience. “A hundred ships are in, Mother.”
“Then perhaps you can tell me which
vessel is to be drawing my interest today?” she asked in her sweetest voice.
I looked carefully, letting my eyes rove quickly just as if I were picking a pomegranate from a tree in the moment of being unblinded. The secret to that had always been to let your sight do its own thinking, and judge afterward.
“Arvani’s Pier.” I wasn’t sure what I’d seen, but it was something. Then I realized that a pennant from Copper Downs rode among the masts there. “A ship from the Stone Coast.”
“Mmm.”
We walked on past Arvani’s Pier in silence. I hoped her quiet meant that I had found the truth, but with Mother Vajpai, it could just have readily been the opposite. A pair of foreign sailors, men with skin the color of liquid brass and a strange squareness to their eyes, lurched toward us with leers upon their faces, but three beggars drew them urgently off.
No one of Kalimpura would so much as spit on one of the Lily Goddess’ servants. Priests and their helpers were sacred in general, but the Blades were as widely feared as they were poorly understood.
“It is time for you to decide what habits you will make of your life,” Mother Vajpai said, as if there had been no lapse in our conversation. “A matter of the Death Right is being laid before us by the Bittern Court. It concerns a man of Copper Downs who killed two members of the Street Guild, and has refused justiciary mediation on the grounds that he is a foreigner.”
The Bittern Court concerned itself with the wharfingers and warehousemen and chandlers of these docks, as well as those affairs of the harbor that did not fall within the Boatmen’s Guild. The Petraean in question must have been directly associated with a docked ship, or the case would not have come before a Bittern Ear.
“Why has the Street Guild not taken their own action?” I asked. “They are quite pointed in their discourse, and Death Right would not seem to be difficult to argue.”
“The victims were not acting in a manner that reflects well upon their guild,” she said. “It is being a matter for the Bittern Court because of the killer’s ship in port.”