by Jay Lake
He knew. Everything. My knife hand lay easy in the bath before me. I had not trained for water fighting, but I doubted very much this man had, either. His age and size would slow him.
Never let the enemy see your attack. That had been one of Mother Vajpai’s first lessons. I stalled, talking to cover my small movements. “If you knew, why the charade of sending Septio with me up into the hills?”
“You asked to go.” He sounded delighted. “You would bring yourself to him in the seat of his power. So much easier than abducting you from the city against your will. Surely you realize that you are very difficult to move unwilling.”
I began to slide up out of the tub. “Then I will be on my way, and leave you-” Even as I spoke, I kicked off from the tiled wall beneath my feet, flinging myself at him. That was an attack I would not dare against a prepared enemy.
Mohanda, unfortunately for me, was prepared.
Unfortunately for him, he was also slow.
He raised himself up, thin robe dripping, something long and dark in his hand. For one horrified moment, I thought it was a crossbow. I crashed into that arm above the weapon, then slid my boning knife up into his armpit, letting the leverage of my sinking weight drive the blade farther.
A stupid blow, weak and wrong-angled, but it worked. Mohanda’s arm nearly separated from his shoulder. He shrieked like a child as dark blood gushed from the gaping wound to flood down his body and into the tub. His panicked thrashing kept the blood pouring.
I snatched up his weapon. That was a short iron bar with a reversed barb at the top. Purely defensive-he’d expected me to attack. That meant he almost certainly had allies close by.
Flipping the bar around, I set the barb into the bouncing flab of his belly and smacked it hard with my other hand.
More foulness in the water as I tugged the bar free. I leaned close. “A pity about the Pater Primus. He was never a good man.”
I tugged my knife from his body and, weapons in hand, tried to scrabble out of the tub, but I slipped. Mohanda clutched at my ankle. His eyes had already rolled upward, but his mouth moved. I bent close without setting my ear where he could spit a barb or some such.
“Blackblood…” That was all he said.
I kicked his head so that he slid into the water, then splashed quickly through the next pool as well as the one after that, rinsing as best I could. I felt badly soiled, far more so than I had wading through the drain Below. Climbing out of the second pool, I paused at the door. I was worried about priests on the other side. Or worse, a temple horror like Skinless.
It occurred to me that one way to kill a god was to kill his priests. That required little special training. Without prayer and ceremony, a god will atrophy. Time spun away with every moment for the divine as surely as it did for the human.
“Life is risk,” I whispered, and kicked open the door to race into the next room.
The wood struck a man in the jaw, knocking him screaming to the floor. He’d been too close. His friend I caught with a cut across the face that did little more than loosen his nostrils, but also served to drive him back. Still moving fast, I took the third in the gut with my shoulder. The fourth grabbed at me hard, but I smacked him in the groin with the handle of Mohanda’s weapon.
After that, it was a quick run for the stairs and through the upper baths, which were occupied as normal, at least until my bloody-handed appearance set people to a panic. I rushed with them out into the street.
I needed to reach the Tavernkeep’s place quickly. Tucking my head down and sprinting, I looked for some place to climb unseen. Shouting echoed behind me. I took two corners hard, jumped onto an unattended cart, and from there rolled myself onto the flat roof of some portico. I tucked close against the building as the chase pounded by just below.
After a quick twenty count to let them get ahead, I wriggled to the end of the portico and dropped into the street between the cart and the building. A fat man in an apron over a denim shirt, wearing a straw boater, stared at me with a crate of something in his hands.
“Blessings on your house,” I said in Seliu, then turned into the nearest alley.
Next it was a simple matter to gain the roofs two storeys up. I found a wooden water tank and cleaned myself thoroughly within, then broke the bottom. The flood would greatly trouble the people in the building below, but less so than drinking the water I’d fouled. I climbed down in the other end of the alley, stole a white shirt off a line, and quietly walked the rest of the way to the Tavernkeep’s place.
When I found the tavern, Chowdry was in the main room serving something that smelled very much like home. The scent set my stomach to gurgling. Chowdry looked up and broke into a smile.
“Green, you are being alive!”
“Please,” I replied in Seliu. “I must eat a little, and speak to the Tavernkeep at once.”
“He is marketing.” Chowdry looked around the room. A pair of pardines sat near the fireplace at table with a stoneware bowl and a scattering of flowers. One was the Rectifier, though I did not recognize the other. “You are knowing the Sentence, yes?”
The Sentence? “The Rectifier?”
“I say what his name means, I am thinking.” Chowdry looked apologetic.
That fit. In a strange way.
“Please,” I said. “Some curry.”
He nodded, fidgeted through part of a bow, then ran back into the kitchen. I quickly stepped to the table.
The Rectifier looked up at me. “You should take trophies, you know.” He gave me a feral smile. “I smell the killing on you.”
“I cannot wear the knucklebones so elegantly as some.” Taking a seat, I said to the other pardine, “I am Green. Known to this one a little, and known better to the Tavernkeep.”
She returned my small nod. “You are known.”
As was the manner of their people, she offered no name. She was rangy, perhaps the thinnest of them I’d seen, with tan fur that shaded almost white down her chest and belly. Neither she nor the Rectifier wore much in the way of clothing, unlike the city dwellers such as the Tavernkeep or the Dancing Mistress.
“You are in the midst of a battle?” the Rectifier asked politely.
“In a sense.” I saw no point in coyness. “I seek to throw down the bandit-king who hunts your people near extinction. We hope to catch him before the end of the day, unawares and unprepared.”
“You have an army?” the brown woman asked.
“No. But he is in the city today under guise, and does not have his army, either.” My next words caught in my throat. I forced them out anyway. “I have fought him once already, with the Dancing Mistress beside me. We escaped with our lives. I believe I know how to fight him again.”
The Rectifier grinned wider. “Where will this battle be, so that I might avoid the site at the proper time?”
“The Textile Bourse. Just before the sun downs.” I laid my hands flat on the table. “I have an ally seeking help that can meet Choybalsan on his own terms. I am more concerned with whatever corporeal protection he has with him there. I will need to clear his shields before we can bear him down.”
“So you wish to fight the city’s own guards,” the brown woman said. “After they beat you senseless and leave you in the cells beneath Penitent’s Rest, what plan will you have then?”
“If we succeed, peace for Copper Downs and your people,” I said promptly. “If we fail, I doubt we’ll live to be arrested.”
“Go raise your army of thugs,” the Rectifier said. “We will think on this awhile.”
Then Chowdry came with the curry: fish in masaman, coriander, and Hanchu parsley over steamed rice. It met my gut with a delicious rumble, and recalled me to the hot, wet air of Selistan. I said almost nothing as I ate. The pardines made no answer at all.
The food sufficed.
When I had cleaned my bowl dry, I stood and bowed. “Sometimes it is worth being on the side of the good.”
“If only you know which side that is,” the
brown woman answered.
I nodded at them both and departed.
The crux of the problem came back to Skinless, and with it the seed of my solution. Mother Iron and the other sendings might well be able to mob and drive down Choybalsan, but Blackblood’s avatar had the god’s cruel strength. The avatar was almost an aspect, in truth. And Choybalsan was something more than a northern tulpa.
The god wore the man like a cloak.
I did not think that Blackblood would hold any use for me now. I had slain at least two of his priests, and perhaps more in the baths. His cult was not large. Of how much had I robbed him?
Sanity argued that even approaching the Algeficic Temple under these circumstances bordered on suicide.
My hopes for any success in the coming battle argued that I make the approach.
I wandered, going closer to the Temple Quarter in wide passages across city blocks as I tried to convince myself to do this thing. I prayed for guidance. The Lily Goddess was never so neat as to send me a sign at a time such as this, except for the blessing of my continued existence.
Septio could not advise me. The Dancing Mistress could not advise me. The Blade Mothers were not here.
In the end, I fell back on my oldest guides of all. What would Endurance have me do? What would my grandmother have me do?
That was when I knew I must find a way to make all this end decently. Whatever the cost to me. I could not let this city fall.
I found a quiet park a few blocks from the Temple Quarter. It wasn’t much more than an unbuilt corner planted with elms and rhododendrons. A stele stood at the center of a little square of grass in commemoration of some long-vanished personage.
Drifting past it, I sat under the tree in the farthest corner. There I toyed with the bell. I wondered why I was carrying it now.
To remind you of what you lost, said a voice within my head. Of what every child loses, even if they stay at their mother’s hearth all the days of their life.
That was said so clearly that I looked around, expecting to find someone close by. Conscience, I supposed. Or my Goddess finally answering me.
I still felt troubled, but less so. Comforted, even. Like a prayer, come the other way to feed my soul. Was this how it had been for the Temple Mother? To be a vessel, not for some priest’s lust, but for the Goddess Herself?
Looking at the sky, I saw that I had lost all but my last hour. I needed to be afoot and quickly. Stepping out of the park, I trotted toward the Temple Quarter and the Street of Horizons. I would meet Blackblood in his own house and tell him of the deaths of his priests.
You killed the Pater Primus, the voice said, but did he not conspire against his own god?
The tall metal doors of the pain god’s temple were drawn shut. There were no handles on the outside. Somehow, knocking did not seem to be the answer.
I stepped back and looked at the black-tiled face of the building. It was certainly climbable, but the rumor of war had put a number of people on this street looking for comfort or counsel. I did not wish to be quite so public as all that.
On the right, the temple nearly butted against a blocky tan building fronted by squat pillars, which looked older than everything around it. On the left, a slim gap separated Blackblood’s temple from a white stucco wall topped with a gold-colored pediment.
Promising, that. I slipped within.
The shadows showed two brick walls facing one another over a trench of shattered glass, broken furniture, and other refuse. A very strange midden. That was an opening I could climb, though, and so I set my back against the neighboring wall and my hands and feet against Blackblood’s wall to begin my ascent.
No wonder his sanctuary had lacked windows, I realized. Except for the roof, there was nowhere to put them. I had a bad moment with some iron gutters, but then I found myself staring from the outside at wide, short windows in the little hutch on the roof that was the clerestory.
I tried to recall the drop within. Thirty feet, even after accounting for the rise of the front steps from the street level. Banners hung there, so I had a way down.
On close inspection, the windows were hinged to open, perhaps against the summer heat. The wood was silvered and powdery with rot. No one had touched them with paint or glazing in my lifetime, at least. The problem would be prying one open without breaking the glass, or the ancient hinges making a horrendous noise.
With a silent apology to whatever cutler had originally made it, I slid the tip of my boning knife around the rim of one window. It caught hard in two places, so I moved to the next. I had to try four times before I found one that had not been frozen shut from the inside.
I worked very slowly to ease my chosen window out and up. The hinges resisted, then groaned and popped with a spray of rust. Silently cursing, I pulled the frame open past a right angle. I tucked the knife away, set the bell beside the opening, and propped the window with my left hand while I explored where to go next.
I crawled inward to a rafter spanning the gap formed by the interior of the clerestory. Below me, three men in street clothes argued next to the long pool of quicksilver.
Quietly I eased my bell in, then lowered the window behind me. When I looked down, the men were staring upward. One had a pistol in his hand; the other two were unarmed. I could see the question forming in their minds.
No time like the present. I tossed my bell toward the mercury and dropped knife-first onto the pistolier.
Thirty feet is a very long fall, especially toward an opponent who is no longer surprised by your appearance and has his weapon primed and ready. He discharged his pistol. Something slammed me hard in the left shoulder. I spun, forced into a tumble.
I landed on the priest but lost control of the boning knife. It skittered across the floor like a nervous chiurgeon. As I rolled over to fight him, my left arm gave way underneath my weight. Someone kicked me very hard in the wounded shoulder. I yelped, but swallowed it, and tried to curl into a ball. That earned me a pair of kicks to the spine. Then they decided to talk.
“By all the wounds of Martri, I think he’s killed Sextio!”
That was punctuated by a kick so hard, I felt bile surge in my mouth. I tried to ease past the corner of the pain that had taken my shoulder.
Another voice: “No. This is that girl of Septio’s again. Small wonder the Pater Primus is so afraid of this one.”
“Well, and crap. If Sextio’s dead, we’re even shorter handed, with all the others Primus took.”
“It will soon be over.” That one walked away, calling over his shoulder, “Throw her to Skinless. Let the god take her up if he can. Everyone should have a last meal.”
“I hate this,” muttered the kicker. He grabbed my heels and began to drag me. My pain multiplied. Then he dropped my legs to step away a moment. I had some swift fever dream of freedom, until the bell fell on my chest. It was beaded with dollops of mercury.
I saw my face distorted by the curve of each little mirror. My body bumped over flooring and a few steps, while my shoulder grew cold. My appearance seemed to change, become in one bit of quicksilver a farmwife like that wretched woman Shar, back on Papa’s farm. In another, I was a priestess standing before a glittering altar, my face tattooed with silver tears. In another, I wore a helmet of strange design and swung a sword that crackled with lightning.
On and on, like the faces in the lilies of my dream. I would become a hundred tiny imperfect copies of myself. Was this how the titanic gods and goddesses had felt when they splintered?
A slab of metal boomed close by. An iron door, some part of me realized. I looked up at the priest in his ill-fitted doublet with the pimple on his nose and murder in his eye. “You will all die,” I told him.
“Everyone dies.” He pushed me into a hole. I fell hard into darkness.
I awoke in deep night.
All is lost! I had not gone to our ambush even with my own little knife, let alone with Skinless.
Skinless. That name made the rest of my body a
s cold as my left arm. I knew it was there, for it pressed against me, but it might as well have been cleaved off by an angry girl with a boning knife.
Night, or a sacred labyrinth in a temple cellar where no one had bothered to set the gaslights burning.
Something was very, very close to me. Something that did not breathe. I tried to open my eyes, but they were already open.
Black, black as Below without coldfire. Black as a pain god’s heart.
A snuffling noise. Dampness close to my face. A smell like meat in a sudden, overwhelming wave as if my nose had woken up.
“Skinless,” I whispered. “You know me.”
Which was a lie, of course. I’d fought him as he’d dragged away the Dancing Mistress. Nothing had been right since.
A huge pair of hands closed on me as if I were a poppet. A rough tongue licked at the blood on my left shoulder, granting me new agony in exchange. This time I let myself scream. Why not? Nothing was left to hide. Not here, at the end of things.
We moved. Whatever Skinless required a theopomp for, it did not seem to need Septio today.
“I took him into my arms the day before he died,” I whispered. “Was he your friend?” My breath was ragged in my chest, though I could not say if this wave of pain was from my injured body or my wounded heart. “When death could be cheated no more, I gave him the gift of mercy.”
My thoughts were clearing. Hours on the rack beneath the whip had granted me a certain perspective even when my mind was under assault. There was nothing of pleasure about this pain, but I’d met such intensity before and kept my head.
We raced, twisting and turning and occasionally jumping. Whatever the path to the god’s bed, it was larger than the space that contained it.
Gods were always larger than the space that contained them.
No wonder Federo is mad beyond lunacy. Vessel for a god. Divine catamite.
I pitied him then, even his murdering madness. Did he crave his times in the city, when he could pretend normalcy even amid the scheming?
The Factor spoke up in my memory. “Peace,” he said, “and prosperity and quiet streets at night, and silent gods who could not meddle daily in the business of men.”