by Jay Lake
She stepped right through my attack, slapping me on the head to show the blow she could have landed.
“What is being so strange about you, Green,” she said once more in that conversational voice, “is that you are so natural at defense, but are so struggling with offense.”
I hopped up from the floor. “I learned in a different school, Mother.”
“Were you taught to fight at all?”
“No,” I admitted. I’d managed to avoid this question so far, out of sheer embarrassment. “I was taught to dodge the attack, then flee.”
“Ah.” She looked thoughtful a moment. “I will speak to Mother Anai. We will find a way for you. You are being strong and fast as any Blade we have ever trained. There are merely certain arrows which have not yet been placed within your quiver.”
Though I did not glimpse then what this would portend for me, I saw the Lily Goddess for the first time in those months. We knelt to prayers every evening at sundown unless something urgent excused us. There were services every day, at which the priestly aspirants spent almost all their time. The Blades and their aspirants were expected mostly on Monday and Friday. Monday is the moon’s day, of course, and the moon governs women during the years of motherhood. Friday is the Goddess’ day, honoring the beauty best displayed by youth.
On ordinary days, when there was no feast or presentation, the Temple Mother—an old woman with frosted hair and strangely pale eyes for a Selistani—or one of her senior priestly Mothers would come into the sanctuary before dawn and consecrate the altar amid the sacred circle. The altar itself was a great silver lily, almost six feet wide, sculpted as a flower yet half-opened. The sanctuary stood at the core of the temple building, so that the soaring, tapered roof was like a chimney above the circular walls. Benches rose along the walls, with a steep drop from layer to layer so that we aspirants looked at the tops of the heads of the women below us.
There was always a great deal of praying and incense and scented smoke; then the Temple Mother would address the Lily Goddess directly through the altar. For the first weeks, I thought that just another form of prayer. But one Monday, the Temple Mother was following her order of service when a wind came up in the sanctuary. It ruffled the pages of the prayer books, which I could not read, for the crawling Seliu script was still a mystery to me at that time. It tugged at hair and sleeves and trailing hymns.
This was a whirlwind, I realized, circling on the Temple Mother. She seemed to get larger and larger, until she towered above us all. I understood this even at the same time that my eyes plainly saw her standing before the silver lily just as always.
When her voice boomed, it should have ground stone. The Goddess pronounced words that were not meant for me, but concerned rather justice for a house I did not then recognize the name of. The very sound of Her echoed in my head, made my knuckles ache, buzzed in the stone of the bench on which I sat.
I said nothing when prayers resumed, but as we rose after the final chantry in order to find our way out, I poked Samma. “That was very strange.”
She brushed my hand away with a little smile. “What?”
“How the Goddess . . .” My voice trailed off when I saw her blank look. She not only had not noticed, but she also seemed unable to understand what I was telling her.
Later, I sought out Mother Vajpai. Our nine were taking the midday meal down in the dining hall, but I’d skipped the seating to find a quiet moment with her. She was in one of the public offices, reviewing accounts with a bursar from the Court of Starlings. That court dealt with trade in textiles and leather goods, and oversaw justice, banking, and regulation for those trades and their castes within Kalimpura, as well as dyers, scriveners, and the lesser toymakers.
When the old man, bent but bright, shuffled out of the little room, Mother Vajpai nodded to me. I arose from my bench in the hall amid other appointments and supplicants and stepped within.
“What is it, Green?” she asked, not unkindly. “In moments, I must see the adjudicator from the Frutiers’ Guild about a Death Right matter, so I shall ask you to be quick.”
“This morning, at the services . . .” My words felt strangely foolish, even in my own mouth. “I thought I saw the Goddess.”
“You give Her no more credit than you are giving the ice-sellers in the street, Green. Even so, I have no doubt that if you are thinking you saw Her, then you saw Her. She appears within the mind of anyone to whom She speaks.”
“She wasn’t speaking to me, Mother. Her words were about justice for a noble house. The Temple Mother was tall as a tree, while a great wind bore in circles around us all.”
“Really?” Mother Vajpai was rarely surprised, but she seemed so that day. “Interesting. Perhaps you are in the wrong order. I am certain that the priestesses would love to have you on the strength of this report alone.”
“N-no thank you, Mother.” I turned to leave.
“Green.”
I looked back at her.
Mother Vajpai smiled sweetly, the silver edges of her teeth shining wetly. “I am pleased you are telling me such things.”
And so began my long troubled journey on the path of the Lily Goddess.
Kalimpura was a city of festivals. The Lily Goddess had Her own, of course, a day that involved flowers raining from the rooftops and women in silver veils pouring from houses great and small. The Temple of the Silver Lily decanted a special violet wine that was carried in trays atop the heads of dancing dwarves and children hired for the occasion from the Mummers’ Guild.
Every week, it seemed, some god or goddess or harvest or ruler out of history or famous battle was to be celebrated. Someone was constantly parading through the streets with a bobbling serpent riding the backs of forty men, or a giant ship made of gutta-percha and oiled canvas, or great juggernauts bearing caged tigers and demon statues. Once, I thought I saw caged demons and tiger statues.
The usual crowds were thick as spring mud. A person could run across the heads and shoulders of a festival crowd.
The nearly continuous state of celebration also meant that there were always people in outlandish costumes. To my eye, trained always to the seriousness of state, this was akin to living amid an everchanging field of flowers. Every step outside the temple was a chance to encounter a beaked head larger than the Factor’s coach, or stiltwalkers bound for their luncheon from a parade rehearsal, or a troupe of false foreigners in costumes meant to evoke Hanchu or the Saffron Tower or the Smagadine city-states.
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 po
ol. 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, there 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 no
thing. 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.