by Jay Lake
“Trade,” I muttered. “That wasn’t—”
She interrupted me, still soft and careful. “Trade is not like a snake. You can cut the head, even gut the body, burn all the ships and warehouses. Someone will come along on the next quiet day and begin it anew. You cannot kill trade. Not at the point of a blade, not with all the fire in your heart.”
Spitting over the rail, I said, “I am not trade. I am a person.”
“People are traded everywhere. Apprenticeships, betrothals, the swearing of soldiers and hiring of sailors.”
“They chose their fates.”
“Green.” Her tone grew pitying. “How many brides select the man they marry? How many apprentices looked across the trades of their city and decided which they would pursue? Most people never choose anything. They are chosen for, or they follow what is left to them after their choices have been eaten away by time, by ill fortune, by their own actions or the deeds of others.”
I wanted to slap her, to restart our fight and give the Dancing Mistress the beating of her life. She didn’t know; she didn’t understand. She didn’t care.
“Green.”
Turning my back to her, I stared at the stern. The man at the tiller—I did not yet know his name—waved and smiled. He seemed impervious to the thunder that must have hung in my eyes. Or the last, failing light of day had cloaked my face too much for him to see.
“Green.” She touched my shoulder.
I swung around with a hard block, then pulled my blow before it landed. “What!?”
“You are not wrong. It is just never so simple as we would like. Children should be free to grow and prosper and choose. So should adults. All persons, of any race or kind. That you would keep more children in their homes is a noble ambition. Do not forsake it. Just learn what it will mean. Should the prettiest girl in a family that starves stay home and starve with them? What if her price will bring her to a comfortable house, and feed her brothers through the next failed harvest?”
My tears continued to flow. “That cannot be right.”
“Many things are not right. You can dedicate yourself to repairing some wrongs, but not even the titanics could have repaired all the ills of the world. In their time, they sundered, and from them have splintered all the folk of the world. We each carry a measure of grace, and we each carry a measure of evil. There is never enough grace to banish the evil, and there is never enough evil to smother the grace.”
“So no one does anything.” My heart was leaden. My throat had closed. The very words were bitter in my mouth.
“People do what they can.” Her hand on my shoulder squeezed tight. “When you strode into the Ducal Palace, you threw down more evil than a generation of child-sellers could possibly wreak.”
“That was not my evil.” I felt very small in my shame and anger. “It belonged to your people, and to Copper Downs.”
“No, it was not your evil, yet you fixed what you were able to.” Her smile was tender by the rising moon.
“Then why have you come to call me back?”
“I have already told you. More evil is afoot. Many of us believe your place in the breaking of the old order gives you power in the new.”
“It isn’t power I want.”
She knelt. “You could still leave this ship and take foot back to your temple. When their anger has banked to coals, they might even take you in once more. That choice is yours. But I beg you to come and help, for my sake. For the city’s sake.”
“Get up, get up.” I flushed with embarrassment now. Goddess only knew what the tillerman thought. “The Goddess has sent me. I am going.”
“When you released the spells upon the Duke,” the Dancing Mistress said late the next afternoon as a pot of fish soup bubbled between us, “what did you see and feel? Where did this take place?”
“W-we were in a counting room.” The memory was intense and difficult to frame into words, for then I had not yet taken up this habit of writing my story behind me. “There was no throne—it was not an audience chamber, but rather a place where men would meet to talk over numbers until their arguments turned to agreement. He toyed with me awhile, then I jumped at him and spoke the words you gave me.” I paused for a deep breath of air, which despite the baking sun tasted almost chill for a moment. “Then he was gone.”
“I know he is gone. His power is not.”
“It must be. That might swirled around me like a storm of dust and air, and plucked at me with a thousand small fingers. Then his power wailed away, taking him with it.”
“We did not study our war so well.” The Dancing Mistress’ voice was sad and slow. “People came as claimants to a vacant throne. What they sought was not his Ducal coronet, but the power that hung like a pall over Copper Downs. I was forced to deal with one of these shamans myself.” Her eyes were haunted a moment. “At great cost.”
“I am sorry,” I said.
“No, no. It must be done. In the Duke’s absence since, the gods have stirred from their long silence. At least one has been slain out of hand—”
“Slain!?” I paused. “I am sorry for the interruption, Mistress, but gods are not meant to be killed.”
“They certainly do not think so.” Her smile was crooked. “It is something that can be done. With the right preparation and the right powers.”
“Small wonder the Lily Goddess fears,” I said. “If even that idea crosses the Storm Sea, She is at risk. Let alone someone with the sort of weapon that can do the job.”
“Oh, it is far more complex than possessing a mere weapon.” The Dancing Mistress frowned. “I do not have the secret of it myself, and wish nothing to do with such knowledge, but the Interim Council had discussed it more than once.”
“Interim Council?” The sound of that title bothered me. I had read enough history to know better.
“When the Duke fell,” she said heavily, “Federo stood forward, with a few of the great trading factors. Our little plan was secret enough, but general discontent was a club sport in Copper Downs under the Duke. It was not hard to find people who thought they knew better.”
“I suppose after four hundred years, there was no heir to come forward.”
“No. Not a trace of the old ruling house. The Duke had been a collateral cousin, but he’d killed them all long before they could die of old age. To keep there from being a claim. That was part of his own grip on power.”
“Your council rules the city now?” I was fascinated at the idea of the Dancing Mistress—a quiet woman who walked in shadow—sitting at the table of government.
“To some degree. The gods have bestirred themselves after long silence, the priests bicker, and our sister states along the Stone Coast have asserted all manner of baroque rights and interests.”
“Were you sent on this errand to get you out of the city?” I asked her gently.
“I claimed this mission for my own.” She smiled again, this time with genuine affection. “The council would have sent an embassy with edicts to claim you, if you yet lived. We had learned from the captain of Southern Escape where you went, and were set to petition the Prince of the City to proclaim you free and seek you out.”
That made me laugh. “The Prince of the City? He is a fop with less power than a decently successful chandler. He sits on a throne of lapis and silver to impress foreigners, and spends his time seducing their wives.”
“This is not so clear from Copper Downs,” she said with asperity.
“No. Petraeans see a title and think it makes the man.”
She returned my laugh. “You have become one of your country.”
“No more than you are.”
“No, I suppose not.” With a gathering of breath, the Dancing Mistress resumed her tale. “A claim has been made upon the Ducal throne. A threat, really. A bandit chieftain in the Blue Mountains campaigns ever closer to the city. His name is Choybalsan. He has taken up some of this old magic of my people, and wiped out half a dozen prides of us when we tried to fight him.
”
“Oh . . .” I stepped around the fire and reached for her hand. “I am very sorry. So many soulpaths clipped to nothing.”
“To be sure.” She pulled away from me to stir the pot awhile. Then: “We are not numerous now. We never were, in truth. It would not take much more to drive my people from the world as anything but a memory.”
I sat with her in silence, until the Dancing Mistress was ready to resume the tale. Finally, she was. “Choybalsan is as deadly to my race as a fire to a forest. He has upset the gods as well. He seems likely to rise on the back of this freed magic to oppose them.”
“Did he kill the god who was slain?”
“Goddess. Marya, who watched over women’s desires. No, not him. We are not sure who did the deed—agents of the Saffron Tower acting in secret, or some darker force. That is what most disturbs the priests of Copper Downs.”
I could imagine.
“So,” she went on, “we come to you. The only person alive besides Choybalsan who has controlled that magic he now rides.”
Recoiling with horror, I nearly shouted, “I did not control it!” The tillerman Chowdry looked up to see what we were about with our arguing.
The Dancing Mistress shook her head. “Oh, surely you did, when you unbound the spells from the Duke.”
This so distressed me that I went and exercised myself with a boat hook for a very long time, until the captain came to beg me to stop destroying the rail.
We avoided each other most of that day, but the sense of the Dancing Mistress’ story was clear enough. I had touched it last before this Choybalsan. If anyone could turn him, it might be me.
Such reasoning smacked of idiotic desperation. The Duke had spent four centuries suppressing all other powers in his demesne. He’d even cowed the gods to silence. Who else could rise up now to defend Copper Downs?
Not me. Toppling one magic-ridden despot was more than enough to last me this lifetime and my next several turns on the Wheel besides.
In time we reached the shipping lanes. I’d grown accustomed to Utavi and his sailors—the nervously smiling Chowdry, Utavi’s giant catamite Tullah, the rest of the sullen crew, but I was eager to be on to the Stone Coast. Loitering in the shallows along Bhopura gained us nothing. Along the way, our hosts had argued several times late into the night, making me nervous, but always they hid their words from us.
The captain did not hide so much. He grumbled time and again. I think Utavi would have sold us out even then if he could have found a buyer, though our swaggering ways and his fear of Mother Vajpai should have discouraged him from that plan.
In any case, he took us out into the deeper water, away from Chittachai’s natural habitat, where we could find the big oceangoing traffic. The men grew nervous in the open sea, but money was money, and they were making well more than a year’s wages with the work of little more than a week. We hailed two ships before we found a third who would both answer and admit to being bound for the Stone Coast. Lucidinous was a high-sided iron-hulled vessel flying a flag from Dun Cranmoor.
When we’d finally talked ourselves aboard, Chowdry scrambled after me up the ladder.
“Where are you going?” I asked him roughly in Seliu.
“Utavi has threatened my life,” he replied with a quaver in his voice. “I would not agree to bind you over for sale back in Kalimpura.”
Bastards, I thought. It had been Chowdry who seemed at the disdvantage in their whispered disputes.
“You have no place where I am going,” I hissed, but already Utavi was cursing loudly from below, and pale-skinned sailors were tugging me over the rail. They glared down at Chowdry, then heaved him aboard as well when Utavi showed them a long curved blade.
The decision was out of our hands.
Chowdry stood at the rail and cursed in some dialect of Seliu that I could barely follow, until a pair of bulky men took us all to see a ship’s mate.
He was as pale as the rest of them, which was to say in these latitudes red as an apple above his sweat-stained whites. “You ain’t armed, I trust.”
I was mortified at how pleasing I found a Petraean voice. “Only a work knife, sir,” I said.
The Dancing Mistress bowed and flexed her claws.
“You don’t worry me, ma’am,” he told her with a tight smile. “Come on, then.” The mate waved us out.
We followed, Chowdry reluctant in the face of new authority. We were swiftly brought to a small mess. Looking at the four men waiting behind the table, I realized this was a hearing.
Then I saw that one of them was Srini, the purser from Southern Escape.
His astonishment was even greater than my own. “Green,” he said in Seliu, half-rising from his seat. He took it again in some embarrassment as the fat man at the end of the table glared him down.
“Srini,” I said in Petraean. “It is good to see you again.”
“These people are known to you?” the captain asked Srini.
“Only the gi—” He took in my cropped hair and sailor’s clothes, then corrected himself. “Only Green.”
The purser’s slip might as well have been a thunderclap, but no one else seemed to notice.
“Not many of you southern lads speak so well,” the captain said. “What are you doing with this pardine?” He turned to the Dancing Mistress. “Begging your pardon, my lady.”
“No pardon required,” she said graciously. “Green was my very apt pupil in Copper Downs.”
The look in his eyes told me I’d just risen considerably in status. “We’re well under way, even with stopping to take you on. So you’ll all be coming north. We call at Lost Port, then Copper Downs, then home to Dun Cranmoor.”
“I can guarantee you triple fare when we land at Copper Downs,” the Dancing Mistress told him.
“Or we’ll work for it now,” I added. “I am an experienced cook, both in palace and aboard ship.”
“What of your father here?”
Father? I wondered for a brief desperate moment, before I understood the man’s assumption. “Chowdry?” I looked at him. He stank with fear sweat. How had I let this happen? The Goddess had her purpose for Chowdry, of course, but it would be a long time yet before I could glimpse Her plan. “We will account for him.”
“Sir,” said Srini. “I am speaking for Green and her companion. If they stand for the Selistani, I would consider him stood for.”
The captain frowned. “You three are on your parole. Srini, if they jump, you’ll meet their fare out of your own pay.”
“Yes, sir,” the purser said.
“Thank you,” I added.
The Dancing Mistress simply bowed her head.
With that, the hearing was ended. We were now aboard Lucidinous as something midway between prisoner and passenger.
We were shown to quarters. Chowdry bunked with the deck idlers with their hammocks slung near the bow. The Dancing Mistress and I were given a small space below, amid a crowd of grumbling servants within a windowless cabin that stank of sweat and old hair.
Copper Downs was my path home to Kalimpura once more. Perhaps my life was to be traced in a circle. At my quiet request, Srini found me supplies from the sail maker—even with a kettle, Lucidinous spread canvas when the winds favored her. During the quiet watches I sewed another, cruder version of the blacks I had worn as Neckbreaker.
As the voyage progressed, the Dancing Mistress and I continued to discuss the politics of the city. I could tell that she suspected Federo of something—old trust breached—but it was just as clear that she wanted me to make my own judgments. Chowdry joined us often enough, but he was sullen and withdrawn, obviously lost in regret over his impulse to follow us up the ladder.
All in all, it was a better voyage than I could have asked for.
I did not leave the ship at Lost Port. Neither did the Dancing Mistress. Captain Barks hadn’t forbidden it, but I saw no point in risking his wrath. Instead we remained unusually at leisure, and talked about cities.
�
�My people do not raise stone halls,” she told me. “We never have. Whatever god first set monkeys free with fire in their hands and ideas in their heads created city builders. It is humans who do this. That is why you outnumber all the other races of the world combined.”
“In all the plate of the world, do you suppose that is true?”
The Dancing Mistress looked at me sidelong. “Perhaps not a hundred thousand leagues east or west, no. But you could not travel that far in your lifetime.”
I smiled at her. “A fast ship and a good crew.” Far away from Choybalsan, the Bittern Court, and all the ghosts already following me, though I was not yet sixteen summers old.
“Until you reached a desert or a mountain spine your hull could not cross. There you would not speak the language, or know the money. You would wind up begging beside some purple dock amid people who speak with feathers and curse one another with flowers.”
I could imagine worse fates. I’d delivered worse fates. Even now, her words that day sometimes call to my heart, though I’ve long since set myself a different course. Then, I merely said, “I am not made to be a sailor on the seas of fate in any case. The Goddess has sent me, you have called me. Someday I will go back to Kalimpura. I know my life.”
“No one knows their life, Green. Not until it is done and some grandchild marks a line or two upon their grave.”
When landfall at Copper Downs was upon us, I begged a favor of the Dancing Mistress. “Do not yet tell Federo I am returned, please.”
“I am not so certain what is the right thing to do here.”
“Nor am I. So let us start with the simple things. You are going to find or send for funds to pay our passage. Chowdry is going ashore with us. You will need all of our fares.”
The Dancing Mistress frowned thoughtfully. “That might make it easier, if I can speak of him. I will need to send word.”
An idea occurred to me, something between fatal idiocy and clear-eyed brilliance. “I will go. As Neckbreaker. My Petraean is as good as any native’s.”