by Jay Lake
“Wherever they are, I suppose.”
“No, I mean for sport. If a woman desires to be scourged, or loved, by another woman, where does she go?”
“I am not sure.”
The Dancing Mistress was embarrassed. I laughed at her, and began making it my business to catch the eye of the tougher women I met. Some looked back with a certain glint, to be sure, but I would need to work out the safe approach for these people and this place.
I had not appreciated what riches of sisterhood the Lily Blades had offered until they were lost to me.
Changing the subject, I said, “I have seen a few of Choybalsan’s posters, but mostly what they tell me is that this bandit king has a friend with a printing press. The city is fallen on hard times, but nothing desperate.”
“Times will be desperate soon,” she said. “Did you see this morning’s broadsheets when we passed the bookseller on Finewire Street? Choybalsan’s men have broken the altars at the Temple of Air in the Eirigene Pass.”
I knew more of Stone Coast geography than I really cared for, thanks to my lessoning. “That would put him less than three days’ ride from Copper Downs, should he come down the Barley Road by horse.”
“Yes. Have you noticed all the lading down at the docks is onto ships? Almost nothing comes off.”
I thought about that for a moment. “Yes, I did, but I do not recognize the significance.”
“Lading is work for the longshoremen and dock idlers either way. Yet if one sits in a seat of government, that is terrible bad news. There are quiet men with account books who will lecture you about balance of trade. Even the broadsheets talk of it now. In years past, you could not get most Petraeans to understand why money is not the same the world over. Hard times make for sharp thinking.”
“Why have the people not fled?”
“Some have.” She shrugged. “Others… where would they go? It is a hard road overland to either Lost Port or Dun Cranmoor. There are not many berths aboard ships. People stay, scavenge wood scraps to board their windows, and hope they have enough coal and potatoes to last if the markets are shut down for a while.”
“And no ghosts,” I replied. “I have not felt a prickle of the spell of release that I spoke. No strange power of any sort since spying the Factor’s glamer the first day. If we do not find wisdom in the Temple Quarter, I think we must again go Below.”
Even from a distance, the houses of the gods were clearly in disarray. Broken domes were visible from halfway across the city. The gods might have stirred from their long silence, but they hadn’t yet concerned themselves with matters architectural.
Closer in, the Dancing Mistress pointed out to me the fat iron posts scattered along the east curb of Pelagic Street, which bounded the west edge of the Temple Quarter. “For many years, no one passed within except the consecrated, the very brave, and the foolishly suicidal. Offering boxes were set here for such temples as remained active through the Duke’s reign. People slipped their money in, or hung bags of food for the priests. Sometimes they even prayed. No one crossed a temple door without good reason.”
I remembered Septio from our underground runs. He had been a strange young man, not much older than myself, who had hinted at rivalries and jealousies among the priests who served his god Blackblood.
“Why were they so dangerous?”
“Were?” She laughed as we passed a building faced in slick black tiles. A pair of rusted iron doors stood open, much too tall. “They are more dangerous now. Better organized. In the quiet times, there were-well, tulpas perhaps.”
“Mother Iron and the like?”
“Yes. What do you suppose happens to the dreams of a silent god?”
I considered that. “They might walk into the world, if the god were great enough.”
“Exactly.”
As opposed to someone from the world walking into a dream, as her people did from time to time. “It is tempting to wonder if our world itself is the dream of an even greater mind.”
“As I recall,” she said in her teaching voice, “Mistress Danae had you read Gnotius. That was one of his favorite ideas.”
“Gnotius believed he himself was a dream, Mistress. I am not so sure he passed such judgment on the world, as he did not trust in its existence outside his own mind. That mind was what he doubted.”
She laughed. “Now you know why I instructed you in dance and defense, not philosophy.”
We drifted to a halt before a wide boulevard that drove back into the Temple Quarter. It was lined with great, fat-bellied iron pots, each of which hosted a thin sapling. The pots looked as if they could once have been used to boil sacrifices in some rougher, earlier age. Some were broken open by gnarled old roots that reached down into the pavers beneath, showing that great trees had once grown here.
Temples and priories and more anonymous buildings stood on each flank of the road. I realized this quarter was a small city in its own right. We’d walked past it on all four sides, without ever quite coming this close to it before. The Temple Quarter extended for blocks and blocks. From here, it seemed to have an endless depth.
“The Street of Horizons,” the Dancing Mistress said. “So called, I’m told, because it runs forever.”
“Or at least eleven blocks,” I said, working the city-math out as we spoke.
“Yes, but can you see where it exits the quarter?”
I could not. Which really was the point. “Some old glamer?”
“That, or a very clever bit of architecture.”
That was easy to answer. “If we walk this road running almost due east, we should exit the quarter once more.”
“Of course. The architecture is not that clever.”
I headed down the Street of Horizons. The Dancing Mistress followed close behind. She was letting me find my own way. If I could have smelled magic, I knew it would be reeking here like a building after a fire. Whatever the Lily Goddess had feared might be visible in some fashion. Surely the gods knew one another’s spoor, even across the ocean. Their sight ran farther than that of men, whatever one thought of their wisdom.
That borderline blasphemy in mind, I found the temples crowded together like people in a market. In a Copper Downs market, I corrected myself. If they’d been crowded in the Kalimpuri fashion, they would have built literally one on top of the other. There were few common walls. Divine power apparently needed empty air to serve for insulation here in the chilly north.
Where most of the districts of Copper Downs had a style-reflecting either function, as in the warehouses down by the docks, or form, as in the counting houses along Redwallet Street and elsewhere in the financial areas-the temples enjoyed no unifying architecture. Each reflected the needs or nature of their gods. Gods being what they were, that meant the needs and nature of their worshippers.
The Street of Horizons was no longer abandoned, but it was still very quiet. Small groups of people shuffled to and from the demands of their religions. A man with a donkey cart wandered slowly in pursuit of what little trash was strewn on this road. Three young men with shaven heads led a protesting pig on a long leather leash to some sacrifice.
Little enough happened here. I wondered when these temples saw the bulk of their foot traffic. Dawn services? Was there a Petraean holy day? My readings under Mistress Danae had told stories of every possible combination of sacrament and dedication.
“How many people here worship regularly?” I asked.
“The priests complain of this often,” she told me. “There will need to be a generation born without fear of this place before they see the crowds this street was built to host. People sidle in and out as they find the need, but in Copper Downs, the impulse to divinity is still a very private matter.”
“As it is for your people,” I said.
“We do not worship,” the Dancing Mistress said.
“I know. You follow a path.”
“Yes.” She sounded somewhat miffed, as if I’d stolen a secret. “Worship requires
a soul to hunger for the divine.”
I doubted the distinction was so clear and simple, but I would not challenge her. Instead I kept walking, and wondered where the gods were. They did not come out to see me, whatever business they might have been about since their awakening.
If anyone in Copper Downs had recognized the taint of the Duke upon me, I might have thought it one of the gods. While I could not smell magic, they surely could.
Not this day, however.
We found the other end of the eleven blocks without incident. I felt no tickle nor tremble. Nothing. No gods, no ghosts, no in-between northern tulpas.
I was strangely disappointed. Whatever the Lily Goddess had hearkened to, it wasn’t here. Of course, the coils of the Dancing Mistress’ heart didn’t twine through this most human of quarters in Copper Downs. Foreigners and nonhumans were to be found all over this city, but not in the Temple Quarter.
“Nothing,” the Dancing Mistress said in that way she had of continuing conversations we had not actually been having.
“I might as well have been touring the bourses and looking at the corn bids.”
“We did that yesterday,” she said.
At that I had to laugh. Yet the lack of any response here meant we would next seek underground. My ghostly trail of victims would far more easily find me in the darkness below than they would in the busy daylight up here.
“Before we go Below,” I told her, “I would like to make death offerings to the women of the Factor’s court.”
“That is not worship,” she observed.
“I know. I do not mean it to be. I have laid my ghosts that way since you and Federo first showed me the rite of the two candles.” Or tried to lay them, I thought.
We went looking for a wax chandler. The gods had said little enough to me. Perhaps my ghosts would say more. I wanted myself calm before I had to face them.
Half an hour later, the Dancing Mistress and I knelt together in a little grove of bay laurels in a plot of land near an old minehead incongruously located in the Velviere District. I carried lucifer matches with me, but was still quite glad that the sun was out. Autumn was at hand, but this was one of the pleasant days with which the Stone Coast could be blessed at the passing of summer.
I set out twelve black candles and twelve white. The Dancing Mistress had made no further comment at the purchase. I could not be sure how many women and girls had died in the Factor’s house. Probably no one knew to tell me. This number felt right.
One by one I lit them. They burned fitfully in the little breeze, but the trees gave us sufficient shelter to keep them alight. The candles gleamed and spat. I did not have a speaking in mind, but words came to me unbidden.
“We all bent to the whims of a master we could not withstand,” I said. “I meant to set myself free, thinking that would free us all.” I passed my hands over the black and the white. The candles warmed my palms. “I am sorry for what became of you, each and every one.”
The air swirled close. For a moment I thought the Lily Goddess was upon me, but it was just the wind rising and snatching away the flames. Then I realized I was done.
“When will we go before the Interim Council?” I asked her.
“Soon. Word will come, perhaps as early as tomorrow.”
“I would take a good meal and rest my feet. We can go Below this afternoon or this evening, as you see best.”
“Come,” she said. “I know where to find stewed rabbits with corn and peppers.”
I followed her to a meal I was more than pleased to eat.
At dusk we clambered the high wall that blocked the minehead and its tailings from the view of the wealthy who populated the Velviere District. Within the brambled, jumbled space we located the shaft entrance and descended Below by a long creaking ladder.
Once down, we didn’t run as in the old days. We walked carefully with weapons loose in hand, coldfire pressed tight between our fingers. I understood this-we would not draw attention. It seemed a false economy. People saw best with their eyes. Most of what lived Below saw with noses and ears and stranger senses.
The Dancing Mistress did not lead with purpose, either. She murmured occasional warnings, guiding me onward.
I let my senses explore the dark. It was noisy here, in a way I had not remembered from the Below of my earlier days. Kalimpura was loud beneath the stones, but that was more a matter of Below there being a sewer system and thus well supplied with inlets serving to conduct sound. Given our climb down that ladder, we were a good fifty feet beneath the streets. Far beneath the sewers and into the mine galleries.
Old machines loomed, something else I had not encountered before. Rust and corrosion and the faint whiff of stale oil hung heavy in the air. My nose also found stone, of course, and standing water. Wood long gone to rot. Stray breezes. Flesh, but not nearby. My ears echoed with footfalls and odd clatters, but they were directionless phantoms. Threat was everywhere and nowhere.
I thought I had seen the Factor. Was he present in his persona as the Duke as well? The dead ruler had been more like an actor with two roles than a man with two homes. I was not even sure who knew of their commonality.
What of his agents? There had been other undying beneath the Duke’s spell. I’d met two the day I slew him. Not to mention all the guards and functionaries.
We continued to move slowly. My sense of threat was almost overwhelming now. More than generalized dread-I was under attack. I let my pace fade and risked a whisper. “What is it?”
“I do not know,” the Dancing Mistress answered quietly. The edge of fear in her voice chilled my blood.
“Not a ghost…” My words were cut off as something immediately before me shrieked with all the pain of a demon-culled soul.
I swung my blade wide even as my ears flooded with something hot and viscous. The edge caught on nothing. My hearing was blocked, which frightened me immensely. I opened my left hand with its small scoop of coldfire and nearly screamed.
The Dancing Mistress was sliding past me on my off side, away from my blade. She faced even farther left, as if she expected something to burst out of the dark there. Directly before me was a very tall imperfectly shaped man who had no skin. I saw bone and glistening fat and the strange marbled stripes of muscles. His eye sockets were empty, but even so his face was pointed directly at me.
Worst of all, my knife should have touched him.
I swung again. The knife passed through without intersecting his body. A bony muscle-wrapped hand caught me hard in the left temple.
Spinning back on my right heel, I had a moment to think how unfair this was, that he could hit me but I could not hit him, when the Dancing Mistress let fly a screeching cry of her own. All I saw between the shifting shadows and the tears of pain clouding my eyes was a leaping shape. Then I heard a horrid, tearing thump.
She’d attacked him bare-handed, I realized. This one could not be touched with weapons.
My hands lacked claws, but I could still use them well enough. I dropped my knife and charged head-down into the fight. When I hit, the feeling was like striking an open wound. Just grease and thick, slow blood, and nothing to grab on to.
My eyes were not filled with tears, I realized. I was being blinded by a flow of blood from my eyelids and nostrils. No sight, no smell, no hearing, except through a bubbling distance that did nothing to disguise the Dancing Mistress’ shriek of enraged pain.
I head-butted again. This time something cracked. We had finally met one of the “worse things” the Dancing Mistress had promised me so long ago.
Strength, I prayed in a single syllable, then lunged once more. Blinded by darkness and blood, I clawed at the cold mess of this creature until my fingers snagged on bone. I threw my weight backwards and yanked hard as I could.
The piece I gripped stretched away, then snapped back. Our attacker gave another great shriek. I heard the Dancing Mistress’ muffled shout of my name, then utter silence.
I stood with legs spread for a
balanced stance, my hands high and ready for a strike.
Nothing.
Spitting blood, I listened with my mouth open. An old trick.
Nothing.
Carefully I lowered my left hand and touched my face. No blood. My hearing cleared with a faint popping noise. No blood there, either. Only my hands were sticky with the ichor of that shambling horror.
I listened until I ached.
Nothing.
The thing was gone, and the Dancing Mistress gone with it. Or dead .
My coldfire had been wiped out of my left hand with the fight, all but the faintest smear. I lowered myself to the ground and carefully felt across mossy stone until I found my blade. I then turned around and scraped back and forth in the dark until I found walls on both sides of me. Open space stretched in front of me.
There was nothing here.
Frustration boiled into anger. I opened my mouth to shriek, and nearly passed out. Lying on the stones gasping, I realized this was the feeling that came after a wound had bled too much. Yet I was whole.
The thing has forced my blood from me, then fed on it.
That realization made me retch. I’d prefer an honest slash to this rape.
Light flickered ahead. The pale gleam of coldfire in someone’s hand. Staggering to my feet, I held my blade behind me so it would not shine. I half closed my eyes for the same reason.
Whoever came moved slowly and breathed loudly. I waited patient as stone. They approached with care, until I could see they were human, or at least human shaped. My breathing was so shallow, it had virtually paused.
The stranger stopped two paces away. Summoning what little strength I had, I stepped so close, we could have kissed-and set my blade at his throat.
“Who are you?” I growled, ready to slit at a moment.
“H-have you seen a god here?”
By all the demons of far Avedega, I knew that voice. “Septio?” I whispered.
“Yes.”
I could hear him getting angry. I could smell it. “That skinless freak was yours?”
He pushed the blade away. I did not fight. “What happened?” he demanded. “Who are you?”
“I am Green. And your… thing… has stolen away my Dancing Mistress.” Just saying the words made me want to plunge my knife into his gut. I withheld my hand.