by Jay Lake
Fantail beat me to my assailant, and drowned him where he sat in the branches by filling his lungs with water. I cut the string of his dropped bow so that some desperate fellow could not use it behind me. “Where is Firesetter?”
She pointed to where smoke already rose from one of the garden follies—a little six-sided gazebo overlooking a mound of reeds that hinted at a pond.
“Get him and come with me. We must find Surali, and we must rescue our prisoners.” I had hopes of finding their account books as well, for later when reason might once more prevail and we would be set to untangling very many messes.
She gathered Firesetter as I trotted toward a two-storey building that showed more signs of being a stronghouse than a bathing house. My hostages would not be somewhere ornate. They would be somewhere easily guarded.
The Red Man touched the door and it burst into flaming flinders. The two guards within ran screaming without stopping to fight us off. We entered, racing through rooms in search of our missing before they became our dead.
The curse I had called down on Surali back in Copper Downs was coming to fruition. I had promised to follow her across the ocean, and burn down the Bittern Court, to sift the ashes for her bones and break them all one by one, then dance on the shards. I had sworn before the gods to cut all their throats and feed them to the pigs.
Though I was already sickening at our slaughter, I could not then have said I was sorrowing. Not yet.
* * *
Emerging from the cellars of the third building we’d searched, I realized the grounds were flooding with even more who were not my people. Guards in the uniforms of some of the other Guilds and Courts marched in small formations, swords and bows at the ready. Laborers, servants, and beggars rushed by in an echo of the beggars’ riot we’d launched down at the dockside just a few days past. Their participation was the result of the swaggering Surali and hers had done these past months.
This was how Kalimpura restored the balance among its powers. Not through the small forces of the wealthy, but through the pressure of the streets. Officers of the Bittern Court were being dragged out, stripped, and beaten by people I did not know. Sometimes bloody knives flashed.
Too bad for all of them.
We had raced for another set of stairs leading down below the building that housed the kitchens, my ears pricked for news, when I saw Ilona running from the gates.
“I will follow!” I shouted to Firesetter and the two Blades who had joined us, then whirled to meet my erstwhile lover. “What are you doing here?” I shouted. “You could be killed.”
“Corinthia Anastasia,” she panted. Then, in Petraean, “I claim the right to find my daughter. You would do no less.”
That I could not argue with. “Fair enough,” I groused. “But stay close to me, and stay safe.”
She kissed me then, tasting of salt water and fear, and whispered into my ear, “No one close to you is ever safe, dear Green.”
Those words stung my eyes with tears. The kiss stung my heart even more. I blinked away the emotion along with my irritation at Ilona for putting herself into harm’s way, then followed swiftly after my little party where they’d gone down among the root cellars and cold rooms that had fed this place.
* * *
Thunder echoed as I clattered down the flight of stairs. By the Wheel, I was late and someone would be hurt. I burst into a lower hall and tripped over the body of a Blade—Mother Fastanjana, I thought. She’d died with one of the long guns in her hand. Another had left her chest a sickening mess.
Vile weapons. They had no honesty behind them. If I lived through this day, I would have to think hard on what to do.
Before me, Firesetter used a dead guard’s body to club two other Street Guild. The hall was filled with the dark, acrid smoke of the accursed firearms. Our enemies collapsed with one final cry. The Red Man threw down his corpse-weapon to grab at his own arm.
Fantail leapt to Firesetter’s side. I saw that he had been hit there as well by one of the long guns. Not torn wide open, as Mother Fastanjana had, but a furrow shredded through muscle and skin where copper brown blood fizzed as it oozed from him.
“Something important is here,” I said. “They would not be guarding taro roots with those weapons.” Where had the other Blade Mothers gotten to? I wasn’t even certain who’d joined us in the rush outside.
Wood splintered above my head as thunder barked again. I realized there was still an ambush in progress. A table overturned two rods down the hall sheltered more defenders.
Firearms or not, there was nothing for it but to rush them. Screaming red rage and bloody murder, I did so. Another crack came so close I swear I felt it. Then I was over the table and among three of them, swinging wildly with my single, god-blooded knife. Why had I not stopped to find other weapons?
It did not matter. That unholy edge sliced through even the iron length of the long gun, and took one man’s face halfway off. Another tried to jab at me with his weapon, for he had not yet finished replenishing the thunder within. I took his hands off at the wrist. Then I kicked him in the fork that he might sit down and bleed to death out of my way.
The third man’s head exploded with another echoing bark so loud my ears rang. I whirled to see Ilona standing on the other side of the table, long gun shivering in her hand. Tears coursed down her face.
“Well done,” I growled. If she wanted to come play Blade, she damned well could play the full part. I would no more let her fall into crying now than I would have permitted any of my Sisters to do so.
Someone screamed close by, through one of the storeroom doors. I yanked it open—the bar was on the outside, of course—to find sacks of flour threatening nobody.
By the Wheel, I will not fail now.
The next door yielded barrels, but no prisoners or Street Guild or Surali.
The third door opened onto the bark of another firearm. Wood exploded in my face, giving me half a hundred bloody splinters. My eyes stung, too, which could not be good.
Samma!
My heart raced. She was here, bound and gagged upon the floor. Corinthia Anastasia had been gagged as well, but it had slipped or she had worked it off, for it was she who shrieked. The Street Guildsman who’d just fired at me tossed his useless weapon away and pulled a knife to cut the girl’s throat. Behind me, Ilona shouted. I wasted a precious second turning to see her being rushed by another Street Guildsman. Where is Firesetter?
There was no more time.
My heart pounded, counting out the precious moments of which I had too few. After all these months, I had no time to act, to save them both.
If I could.
Spinning, I threw the god-blooded knife into the eye of the man drawing steel even now across Corinthia Anastasia’s throat, and spun again to leap into the hall.
Too late, by all the Smagadine hells.
Ilona was already collapsing with a blade stuck into her chest. I broke her assailant’s neck with a high blow, then caught at my friend and lover. We both sank to our knees. A glance showed me Corinthia Anastasia wriggling out from under the dropped body of her last guard. Her mouth was open, but nothing came out.
I cradled Ilona’s head, praying wordlessly even as she began to vomit a sticky, scarlet mass of blood and bile. This woman I had loved in one form or another down the years since we’d first met. Now I’d chosen wrongly.
There had been no right choice.
It was either Ilona or her daughter. One would have died while I saved the other.
Corinthia Anastasia pushed out of the storeroom with my god-blooded knife in her hand. Her throat showed a thin line of red, but the knife had not opened her fully. Thank the Lily Goddess for that.
“You killed her,” she shrieked, then dropped to hug her mother’s bloody chest. “Get away, get away, get away.”
My rage burst its banks as never before, even as measured by the violence that made up my life. It did not matter that I had let her mother die to save the child. It
did not matter that Samma lived, waiting only to be freed now. Boiling, I cut her bonds.
“Green,” she gasped. The look she gave me was somewhere between wretched gratitude and naked fear.
Behind me, Corinthia Anastasia wailed her grief. I tried to say something, to welcome Samma back, to tell her to be glad she still lived. Something.
The words would not come. Only a great shivering of my body and heat in my blood like I had never known.
Ilona.
Turning away from Samma, I took up my weapon and stalked back down the hall, grabbing a hanging lantern as I went. Outside, I spread fire and sword and death until even the very sky was sickened of it.
No one of the Bittern Court was safe from my rage. Not the wounded, not the slow, not the elderly, not even those who had already laid down their weapons and sat on the ground with terror in their eyes at my coming.
In the light of the blazing great hall, Mother Vajpai and Firesetter finally managed to pull me from my slaughters. I fell to my knees crying, glad at least that Ilona had such a burning to see her soul onto the Wheel and wherever it might go from there.
After a while, I vomited, and cast the god-blooded knife into the roaring flames.
* * *
I sat on a hitching stone along Shalavana Avenue and watched the oily black smoke from a dozen burning buildings fill the sky. My eyes had dried, though I still hiccoughed my griefs. No one would come to me. Not even my closest, though Mother Vajpai and Fantail both stood nearby. Whether to protect me or to protect everyone else, I could not say.
Finally, Mother Adhiti, the oxlike woman who’d once aided me in Mother Shesturi’s handle, approached, shrugging past my guardians. She stared down at me awhile before saying, “They are broken.”
As are we all, I thought, but I did not make that into an answer.
Mother Adhiti went on doggedly. “We did not find Surali. Or Mafic. Many of the Street Guild were either not here or have escaped.”
“They are powerless without the Bittern Court behind them,” I muttered. “Just thugs with the same clothes.” In that moment, I cared nothing of Surali or Mafic. Foolish though it was, I felt like a guttering candle, my fire dying out, even for my worst enemies. My thirst for vengeance had been slaked to the point of bursting.
So much death. So much destruction. At my hands and by my word. How could anyone lead Blades, or worse, an army, and survive within their own soul? There were not enough candles in the world to light the paths of the souls I’d struck down today.
I wanted to go back to my own children, but was afraid to bring the stench of death with me.
Mother Vajpai finally approached, reinforcing the stubborn Mother Adhiti. “Though it will be some time before we sort the corpses, we think Surali died in the fire of their great hall. Mafic as well.”
“That was Ilona’s pyre,” I grumbled.
“We know.” She knelt gently before me. “It is done now. We will carry out their dead and ours, and figure the costs. But you have broken them. The Lily Goddess will stand proud. Our lost ones are returned.”
“Do you not know…?”
“Know what?” she asked, alert for some new disaster.
“Ilona died beneath the kitchens as we rescued the hostages.”
“Ah.” Mother Vajpai’s eyes closed briefly. “Did her child see?”
“Yes.” I stared up at her. “I had to ch-choose. Between Corinthia Anastasia and Ilona. There was no t-time to th-think.”
“You know better, Green. Ilona chose when she came here with us.” Mother Vajpai’s voice was hard. “You saved the child, who had made no choice in the matter, did you not?”
“She was my friend. And almost my lover.” My chest felt hollow; my head ached. I could not face what might come next.
“Would she have chosen any differently?”
Mother Vajpai had the right of it, but that did not make me think any better of myself. Nor, did I imagine, would it improve Corinthia Anastasia’s feelings.
“Where is the girl now?” I asked sullenly. “And Samma?” I was ashamed that in my rage I had left her behind in the storeroom where her life had been held hostage.
“Stay with her,” Mother Vajpai ordered Mother Adhiti, then walked away, stumbling only slightly.
Mother Adhiti sat down beside me. She did not try to offer any comfort, which would have meant nothing to me, in any case. Her company was enough, perhaps, to keep me from falling on my knife.
That, and the fact that I had no knife.
* * *
Mother Vajpai returned trailing both Samma and Corinthia Anastasia. Ilona’s daughter clung to my long-lost Blade Sister as if she were the last line between life and death. Samma’s face was bleak and she limped. Perhaps Surali had hurt her here, or perhaps the wounds she’d taken from me back in Copper Downs still troubled her. Corinthia Anastasia would not turn her face to me at all.
I stared at them and found no comfort there. Samma shook her head slowly, then glanced at Mother Vajpai.
“They were with Mother Melia,” our Blade Mother supplied. She rested one hand on Samma’s shoulder. Reclaiming her, in a sense. “Waiting for word of what to do.”
There was no response to that, so I shrugged.
“I will send a handle to escort you back to the temple,” Mother Vajpai told Samma. “This is not a good day to be about the streets. You deserve to be welcomed home.”
Corinthia Anastasia whimpered at those words. She continued to keep her face hidden from me. Though she was still quite young, I knew she was no girl anymore.
My mind seized on the needs of the moment. An escort was a good idea. Certainly there were some Bittern Court survivors out there, and the scattered Street Guild. I did not have the heart to go fire their hall as well.
A little while later, the girls walked away from me hand in hand. Neither looked back. I could do nothing for them now. Or possibly ever again. At least the six women with them would keep the pair safer than I had managed to do.
I supposed I should head to the temple as well. My children were there. It was unlikely I would simply topple off this stone and conveniently die, so finding them again seemed the best thing to do. Knees creaking, I rose to my feet.
“Home again?” asked Mother Vajpai.
I gave her a long look. “Home is where my heart lies. With my heart in ashes…”
She walked back to the temple with me anyway. No one else would come near me, even now. And word must have gone around the city. I passed in an unaccustomed bubble of silence and empty cobbles, strange for Kalimpura. I was poison, frightening to any sane and reasonable person. What else was there but to flee the madwoman?
Mother Vajpai remained blessedly silent, so I spoke in a quiet voice to the Lily Goddess, to Mother Iron, to Desire. I don’t suppose it mattered if they heard me or not. I just had to spit out the bile in my heart before it drowned me.
“You have given me too much,” I said to the uncaring air. “And taken too much with Your other hand.”
No one answered. Whatever thoughts Mother Vajpai had, she wisely kept to herself.
“I would not have paid that price. Nor the other. How was I to know? You might as well have asked me to choose between one of my children and the other. Your cruelty is legend.”
We walked a bit farther in our bubble of silence. An ox lowed nearby, harnessed to a reeking honey wagon, but if that was a message from Endurance, I was too dense to understand. The cobbles beneath my feet were slick with crushed fruits and vegetables. The sweet rotted reek filled my nostrils. So there was a market here.
Who cared?
“I am done with You. With each of You. With all of You. I will take my children and sail until the seas are purple and there are no more horizons, and no one has ever heard of any of You.” I spat. “There. You may have that from me. That is the last service You will ever get.”
More steps in silence. The smell of spiced chicken roasting in a clay oven, which despite my blank despair, m
ade my traitorous mouth water. Someone began to speak, and was shushed with a thump and a squeal. I was barely seeing my own feet now, let alone anything around me, but the city feared me.
That day, I likely could have struck anyone down, and the rest of them would only have stepped away in frightened silence. My thirst for violence was gone. I could not imagine feeling rage ever again. Where my soul had been was only a livid, burnt bruise.
“Go,” I told my goddesses. “Bedevil some other poor fool. We are shut. Everyone who can be safe is safe, and the rest of us walk in chains of memory. I am done.”
In time, Mother Vajpai touched my elbow. My feet had known the path back to the temple, whether or not the rest of me had been paying attention. The plaza of the Blood Fountain was a bit less of a mess. In fact, it was oddly clean. The front steps of the Temple of the Silver Lily were completely bare that day. I don’t know what I would have done if there had been swaggering Street Guild awaiting me—fall on their swords, perhaps—but it seemed unjust that even the beggars and petty vendors could not take their ease.
I stared up at the sweeping, silvered teardrop of this, my supposed home. It truly did resemble a woman’s sweetpocket, I realized, at least the upper portions. The lower levels spread in squat wings ornamented only by swooping pillars and curiously shaped windows. The Temple of the Silver Lily had not been the source of my troubles, but in a real sense, it had been the focus of them. I was reluctant to set foot within.
Mother Vajpai lightly touched my arm once more. “Your children need you.”
Unspoken but clear were the words, We need you.
If not for my children, I might have found a place to sleep and not bothered waking up. My aching breasts reminded me of what my babies required, though, and of my own body’s needs as well.
“I will go in,” I said quietly. Bleak, glum, defeated. The ashes of the Bittern Court’s burning were still strong upon my tongue. This was hardly victory in any sense.
“Come. I will have someone send you up some kava and a northern-style sweet roll. Sit with your children awhile, perhaps wash the battle-stink from you.”