by Jay Lake
I gestured with the bow. “I work all the time.”
Her voice was gentle. “To what end, Green? We serve the Goddess here. You have not recovered your sense of purpose since reaching your final Petal.”
“To whatever end seems best to me. The Goddess moves us all, you say. Perhaps She moves me in a direction you cannot see.”
“As may be.” Mother Vajpai’s tone was bare steel. “For now, you run with the Blades. I’m assigning you to Mother Shesturi. Her handle patrols the city six days a week, on whatever schedule she chooses to set.”
A handle, of course, was a group of Blades.
“I am not yet sworn.”
“You will be soon.”
We shall see, I thought. “What of my dockside forays?”
Long silence. Finally she said, “I will not forbid you those. The Lily Goddess does not hold Her followers prisoner within these walls.”
The implied yet hung between us like a slow curse.
The women of Mother Shesturi’s handle were a mixed lot. All Blades stood outside the norms of the Temple of the Silver Lily, let alone the standards of the women of Kalimpura. I quickly realized that Mother Shesturi had the running of me because her team were the misfits among the misfits.
We gathered in one of the running rooms that let out onto the back of the temple, where the building faced an alley. There were three of these, long and narrow with benches along each side, and rows of racks and hooks. Today the rooms were empty, though I knew from my training they were used to store weapons or equipment for the Blades as needed.
Mother Shesturi herself was a quiet woman. She was compact with an efficient way of moving, which told me I’d likely have trouble taking her down in the practice rooms. She patrolled the city with four other women in her handle.
One was, to my surprise, Mother Argai. The other three I knew, but not particularly well: Mother Adhiti, Mother Gita, and Mother Shig. Mother Adhiti was by far the largest woman in the Blades, and one of the biggest human beings I had ever met. She was mostly muscle. Whipcord-thin Mother Gita rarely spoke. A pink scar seamed her face, giving me a sense of kinship which I immediately recognized as false. Mother Shig was harder to understand. She was small, her complexion almost gray, and she bordered on the misshapen. Even so, she climbed better than I-one of the few in the Temple who could.
Mother Shesturi only nodded and said, “Welcome.” The others muttered, except for Mother Gita, who stared a long moment and then seemed to forget me.
Blades on patrol dressed to be noticed. We wore light armored skirts over leather trousers, blouses of a triple-woven fabric slick to the touch, and knee-high boots. Everything was black. We didn’t strut abroad like members of the Street Guild working protection, or the Claviger Caste searching for criminals escaped from bond. Our patrols were in alleys, through potshops, down into the Below, and back up again.
At first, I didn’t know what we were looking for. I followed Mother Shesturi and her handle high and low through Kalimpura. I already knew how people on the street made way for the Mothers of the Temple. Now I understood why.
A Blade handle on the move was frightening even to me, and I knew these women.
We returned home that first evening with not a dozen words exchanged. We touched no one, caused no fights, ended no fights. We had simply been present, at different times and places all over Kalimpura.
“Target practice in the shooting hall a span before sunrise,” Mother Shesturi announced as we sat in the running room to change into our Temple robes.
That night I had little time to do anything but sleep. I didn’t touch up my costume, or consider venturing out.
The next morning we shot early with bows and crossbows. Mother Shesturi worked us until we had each achieved a tight group with both weapons on all three ranges.
“Run at noon,” she said when we finished up. Time for a bath, then we were on the street again.
So it went for a week straight. The other women of the handle began grumbling, except Mother Gita, who continued to keep her own counsel. After several days, Mother Adhiti looked me over closely. “Surely you are being old enough to mind yourself. How dangerous are you?”
One night we ran to a dozen small havens. Mother Vishtha had told me of them-lean-tos and sheds and hollows, and occasionally entire apartments or offices, scattered across Kalimpura for Blades to seek out if they met with trouble. Our handle checked them from a distance, then sent someone sidling close to certain ones. Being small and swift, that usually was me.
“It is death, you know,” said Mother Argai as I shimmied down a drainpipe from checking a rooftop.
“What?”
“We tell no one. Not even the rest of the Temple. The Blades have very few rules, but one is that we never tell of the small havens except to other Blades.” She leaned so close she could have kissed my ear. “That rule may save your life someday, Green.”
The eighth day we ran, this time well into the evening, was the first time I’d seen a handle meet with trouble. Mother Shesturi brought us up out of the Below behind the Plaza of Broken Swords, right where I’d come up after killing Michael Curry. We came to ground in front of the mango grove I remembered all too well. A group of men squatted beneath the trees with bare steel in hand.
Twelve men, I counted quickly, and noted the best three swordsmen by their stance. Six of us. I was too short-armed to face any of these in a stand-up fight. I wasn’t sure about Mother Shig, either.
Mother Shesturi made the same assessment. She barked our names in order, pointing as she spoke. I was on the right edge of the group, with Mother Shig. I carried only my pigsticker, though the sworn Blades all bore swords.
“Go away home, boys,” Mother Shesturi told them. “Your beds are getting cold.”
The leader held his sword loosely at his side. “The soldier women of Kalimpura.” His Seliu was terribly accented, though the words were right. “I wondered if you were real.” He called out to his men in some language I did not recognize.
Their blades came up.
Mother Shesturi nodded. “No one walks away.” She meant no rules. Faces, joints, necks, hearts, guts. However the enemy presented himself to you. Whatever you needed to drive him down.
Mother Adhiti waded in first. Three of them fell back to draw her on. She kept moving past the springpoint of their trap. Then I lost sight of the others because Mother Shig and I were closed on by two grinning men. They laughed to one another as they came for an easy kill.
Mother Shig sprang into the air, legs splayed wide, and brought her sword down above the guard of one of the attackers to split his face open. He fell screaming as she hopped onto his chest, her heels drumming into his ribs.
His partner turned with a snarl. I slipped the pigsticker in below that crest of bone that rides at the waist, in front of the hips. His armored berk ended a little too high for its intended purpose. The man shrieked and tried to swing back to me, but my blade grated against his hip. I slugged him right next to the embedded blade, then kicked him in the back of the knee. The fighter went down in time to receive Mother Shig’s sword point inches deep into his ear. He kicked twice, then died noisily.
I pulled free my bandit blade and went for the back of another man engaged with Mother Argai. He never saw me coming. I took him with an upthrust to the kidneys-they obviously did not think to be fighting people as short as I still was then. Mother Argai used the momentary respite to slash the throat out of her second attacker. Her third caught her in the shoulder, a rage-filled blow that tore through the black shirt and opened her to the bone.
She collapsed with clenched teeth sucking in a shriek. I stepped close inside her attacker’s swing and took his wrist on my own shoulder. His sword flailed as he punched with his free hand. The knife that I hadn’t seen snagged on the left sleeve of my shirt. I smacked my head hard into his chest, then smacked him there again, trusting Mother Shig to arrive.
Arrive she did, announcing herself by shatterin
g the man’s sword arm. He fell screaming next to Mother Argai, who put her dagger in the soft underpart of his jaw with her off hand.
Then it was over. I couldn’t have counted to twenty through the entire length of the fight. Eight men were dead, one more dying with a wet, wounded bubbling squeak. Three would continue to breathe so long as Mother Shesturi was moved to allow them.
Mother Argai was down with the slashed shoulder, bleeding very badly. Two of Mother Gita’s fingers hung by a flap of skin. She silently pushed them more or less into place, then wrapped tight a strip of cloth.
I tore a cloak from one of the dead men and began to bind Mother Argai’s shoulder. Mother Shig sprinted away at a word from Mother Shesturi.
In this city, even the cutpurses would stop to aid a fallen Blade. Unless she was alone and there was no chance of being caught. Now that the fighting was done, people were drifting into the park. Mother Shesturi deputized half a dozen good-sized men to stand on the necks of the survivors.
Then I realized I was hurt, too. Blood was spattered all down my left sleeve. That side was growing numb.
Mother Gita squatted down next to me and touched the wound on my upper arm with the fingers of her good hand. I nearly passed out from the pain. “Good work,” she said, then began packing dirt into my wound.
Dirt? I thought.
The world whirled in darkness.
“We run as we do so no one will know where to find us,” said Mother Shesturi to me three days later.
“That hardly seems effective,” I mumbled.
“If we are nowhere, we are everywhere. You, Green, were everywhere that night.”
“Wh-who were they?”
“The men we killed?” Her smile was grim. “No one. Nothing. Men bent on stealing something that didn’t belong to them. We found them on accident.”
“Th-then why do we care?”
Mother Shesturi took my hand. “What happens to Kalimpura happens to the Lily Goddess. When the city suffers, She suffers. When we defend everyone, we defend ourselves.”
“We killed a dozen men in the park.” My stomach flipped.
“So we did.” Her tone was even.
The wounded had not survived. Should I sorrow? “Please,” I said. “I would like a dozen black candles, and a dozen white candles. Matches. And if you know, their names.”
“This is not our way.”
“It is my way,” I insisted, feeling my temper bubble.
Eventually she said, “Fair enough.”
I waited for my candles and considered the nature of souls. The air circled in the healing room as if the Goddess had something to say. I glared at Her, wherever She was. “I will be going down to the docks. I wish to hear more of Copper Downs. If they are still buying children, I will know of it.”
No answer came but silence.
It took ten aching days for the slash through my left biceps to heal well enough that I could pull weight with that arm again. The candles had brought me neither peace nor release, but still I felt better for them. I sat in on training with the younger Blade aspirants. The kitchens took more of my time, as I dictated recipes and tasted new experiments in their version of northern cooking. “Bland,” Mother Cook said of a lamb stew, “but we can build on it.” They still liked my baking best.
I also haunted the docks every day in my hand-sewn costume. The leather mask was a bit theatrical, but no one ever saw the slashes on my face, and it diverted attention from the Petraean accent I could never quite shake off.
Drinking among the tars required money. While the Blades drew no salary, let alone their aspirants, the Temple of the Silver Lily was more than wealthy. Since my part in the stand beneath the mango trees, the women of Mother Shesturi’s handle had made it known that my wishes were theirs. No one said anything more about my choice of clothing.
The Fallen Axe quickly became familiar to me. I spent time in winesinks with names like Risthra’s Nipple, Three Bollards, and The Bunghole. It was the barkeep at the Fallen Axe who named me, early in my adventures.
I walked in for the third day in a row, carrying a small purse of copper paisas and a few silver ones. “Oi,” he said. “If it ain’t the Neckbreaker back again. You must be liking of our brew.”
“Deep stuff, my friend.” I let the pain in my arm burr my voice. Likely enough they thought me some younger son of nobility skylarking about in a festival getup.
“I am giving you the better cask today,” he whispered so loudly, the rats in the alley behind the building probably heard. “On account of you almost being a regular customer and all.”
“Mmm.” I made it a point never to thank people when dressed in my blacks.
His barmaid smiled as she brought me a bowl. Even with her missing teeth and the sores at the corner of her mouth, I could see the beauty she would have been. “Here is being your brew now, Neckbreaker.” Her wink was meant to be flirtatious.
If I were in fact the younger son of a great house here in the city, I would be quite a catch. An hour’s dalliance could bring her more reward than months of working drudge at these tables.
I smiled at her, knowing that she would glimpse the crinkle in my eyes.
The stuff was somewhat less foul than his earlier bowls. It slipped up easily enough beneath the edge of my veil. I sat and listened.
Over time, since I had begun haunting the docks, I realized just how many tongues came to this port. Seliu was always spoken to some degree-it was the local language of coin.
Of course, I listened for Petraean. I spoke it better than Seliu, even now, and no one around me would think it my language to look at me. Hanchu I could follow a little bit, and I quickly came to recognize the quick, pattering consonants of Smagadine. There were half a dozen more languages I heard almost every day, and a dozen more than that passed in a given week.
I would never know them all.
Seliu and Petraean were the two most important. Selistan and the Stone Coast stood at each end of the child trade, at least as it had taken me. I had promised myself to stop that somehow, someday.
Yet a ship might have sailors from anywhere within ten thousand leagues of whatever water it sailed upon. Given that the plate of the world was wider than anyone had ever compassed, it followed that the tongues were just as widely scattered. Presuming that the gods had not played some joke and fastened the ends of all things together in a great circle, of course.
We often drilled at our violence on dogs, in the practice room with the channels in the floor and the good drains. Strays were like sand on a beach in Kalimpura. The larger ones took wounds much as people did. Pigs were better for close work, due to similarities that their arrangement of skin and organs held with those of humans. In sparring with spear and short knife, though, I became convinced that I wished to best a bullock.
“You are cracked,” Mother Adhiti told me one day after a grueling session. We’d bruised each other blue and green, like so many orchids tattooed upon our bodies.
“No, no, don’t you see? A bullock would draw out all our strength.” I could see it as a certain man, implacable, powerful, and just as subject to death as any dumb animal.
She looked at me strangely. Even at my current growth, the woman outweighed me twice over and more. “A bullock in a small room like this would draw out all my fear. You would be trampled like plum paste beneath a child’s feet.”
“Then we can fight it at a festival. Make a show of things.” I had not set to with a blade in earnest since the night we’d fought under the mangoes, though months had passed. There would be no more black work until I had sworn my final vows-that was sound-enough policy. Besides, at the moment, I was neither well liked nor widely trusted outside my own handle.
Mother Adhiti mopped her neck. “The temple does not concern itself so much with that sort of spectacle, as you well know, Green. Like all sharp weapons, the Lily Blades are most effective when still in the scabbard.”
“Sheathed, we must always be sheathed.” I flexed m
y knuckles, which ached deliciously.
“If you want to fight so much, go pick trouble down at those docks you seem to love.” Now she was grumpy. “Forget this foolishness with a bullock. No one would let you fight one even if it was our way. You are the youngest and smallest of the Blades.”
With that, she left me. I was no Blade at all, of course.
I shook off my fantasy of fighting such a large animal and followed Mother Adhiti out into the hallway. It was always warm and damp down here, where the temple extended out beneath the buildings and grounds around it. Really, all they’d done was lay claim to some of Below, walling off passages and bringing light and water where they could.
When we reached the stairs that spiraled up into the main part of the building, I found Mother Meiko sitting on the bottommost step. Her walking stick was propped beside her. She drew from a short, stumpy pipe. Today instead of our usual pale robes, she wore the oil-stained pale blue muslin of a woman of the Bucket Carrier Caste.
“Good day, Mother.” I set down my weapons and made the sign of the lily toward her.
“Green.” She sucked noisily on the pipe a moment, then cupped it loose in her hands. “Girl,” she added.
I waited. This woman had come down here for me. She would tell me what she came for when she was ready to do so.
“You desire to fight some great cow, or so I am overhearing.”
“A bullock, Mother.”
“Mmm.” Mother Meiko studied the smoldering wisp within the bowl of her pipe. “An animal. Tell me. What are you?”
“An Aspirant of the Lily Blades of this temple.”
“No. You are not that.”
I was surprised. “Nothing else, Mother.”
“If you were an aspirant of my Blades here, you would be sleeping in the dormitory. Attending, or teaching, the classes with the other aspirants.” She leaned closer. “You would be helping the children of our temple instead of mooning after those whom fate has swept away.”
My desire for an end to child selling was hardly mooning, but I was not willing to argue that with her. “I am what I am.”