Green

by Jay Lake

  “Neither is the Dancing Mistress so blessed.” Though her people’s paths mingled far beyond their lives. That gave me a trace of hope.

  “No. Which is why I have not been so worried.” He sighed. “She called you back from wherever you fled, did she not?”

  Ah, to business. Finally. “To work against the bandit Choybalsan.”

  “I believe I understand her intent, though the details of her plan have not been made known to me.”

  “Whatever the plan was, it has failed.” I stood and stretched. My body ached abominably. “I see nothing here, know nothing.”

  “That is because you are not looking at this problem through the correct lens.” Septio’s smile was small and tight. “The trouble belongs to the gods.”

  “I broke the Duke with my words. The power came from the path of the Dancing Mistress’ people. Not human magic or the dreams of goddesses.”

  “You misunderstand me. Choybalsan is not a bandit chieftain coming with a thousand spears at his back. He is a god rising from the stones of the inland hills. The villages and steadings lost? Most are not burned. They join him.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he is something other than this city. Copper Downs levies taxes, buys low, sells dear, and seduces away the children of the country for leagues about in all directions. What do the highland chiefs and headmen get for their trouble? Their life is like that of a flea which rides a dog. Choybalsan gives them power where they have had none since time out of memory.”

  He leaned close. “That magic of the Duke’s. If you can channel it back, we can help the silent gods find their voices. Blackblood spawns avatars because the god himself is half aware. Likewise many of the other powers of this city. Those that have come to themselves scheme unseemly and poach on the rights and privileges of those who yet lie insensate.”

  So we came to the crux. He wanted his god empowered so the death gods and the hunting gods and whoever else from the divine squabble didn’t make away piecemeal with Blackblood’s supply of fear and pain.

  The gods were like children fighting over cake.

  Was this what the Lily Goddess had feared? An infection of pettiness? More likely the rising godhead of Choybalsan. If new gods of soil and stone could rise here, they could rise anywhere. Would some peasant cult from the distant rice paddies and mango plantations take Kalimpura by storm?

  No wonder so many people despised the tulpas. They were afraid.

  I realized I’d missed part of what Septio was saying. “. . . the Pater Primus. I think you must do it this way.”

  “I will have the Dancing Mistress back before I decide anything. Then I will speak with the Interim Council.” I wanted very much to be quit of this city, but that was not a choice I could make. Not yet, before I could tell the Lily Temple something worthwhile. Or sail west until I became a beggar at some distant dock, well away from the affairs of thrones and temples. I pushed the thought aside. “There has been little of the Duke’s magic here in Copper Downs, so we will go hunting Choybalsan. Under whose banner I do not care, for my sword will be my own.”

  That was a lie of sorts. Though I was on an errand for a goddess myself, I knew which banner I preferred. Kalimpura, wicked as it could be, lived in peace beneath the rule of dozens of smaller powers. The temples there were only a part of the balance. What Septio argued here was for placing the temples at the heart of the matter. More to the point, his temple.

  I could not see how elevating the priests of a pain god to the seats of power was to anyone’s good.

  “Come,” he said.

  I let Septio take my hand and lead me toward the strange mirror. Once more, where I might have expected god magic, it was only a door—albeit a peculiar one. Beyond was a wooden staircase that folded around a shaft. The distant banging of gongs echoed.

  Septio smiled at me in the dim light. I could see his teeth gleam. “We are timely.”

  Blackblood’s sanctuary was nothing of what I might have expected from a pain god. Of a familiar formal design, it could have been any official building in Copper Downs. Pillars of black marble supported a vaulted ceiling on which the stars of some night sky foreign to the Stone Coast had been set in gleaming silver. Dark, narrow banners hung down in shadowed strips, much as they had in the palace. Low galleries behind each rank of pillars left and right hosted a series of stone couches, which might have been funerary platforms in a death house. Narrow curtained windows within the side galleries let in some light—when had it become morning outside? I wondered in a brief burst of worried fear—while gas lamps attached to the pillars hissed with the brightest fire. A pool between the pillars quivered like mud but showed a strange, malleable silver. The sanctuary smelled not of grave dust or funeral herbs, but mostly of the vinegar someone had recently used to clean the floors.

  Neither altar nor throne stood at the far end, just a cluster of men in dark robes with cowls drawn up around their faces. Bareheaded young aspirants—in a brief moment of distraction, I wondered if they were so called here—circled the priests, banging gongs, shaking bells, and casting powders into the air.

  More mummery, of the sort that irked me so. I checked the seating of my veil and trailed Septio toward his fellow priests.

  One looked up at our approach. He lifted a hand. The leaping racket of the aspirants halted between one breath and the next, except for the faint ringing of the settling gongs. The other priests turned to stare.

  They all wore masks woven from thin strips of leather, which covered their faces in ridges running from side to side. Again, mummery, but I had to admire the theater guising. At any distance, the robes would seem empty of all but shadows.

  We worshipped the Lily Goddess bareheaded and barefaced, but perhaps these men felt a need to hide from their god. I knew I would if Blackblood had been my patron.

  Septio stepped into their circle. He made a bow, which courtesy was returned by a series of nods from the masked priests. I tilted my own chin, which courtesy was returned not at all.

  A lesser silver pool was set into the floor at their feet. This one shivered as the great one in the center of the hall had—except where it had been a strangely liquid silver showing nothing, an image was visible in this pool.

  The god magic I had been expecting. I looked.

  Skinless stood on cobbled stone before a whirling cloud of white dust. The Dancing Mistress lay curled on the ground beside it. I realized when I looked at her that the stones were flags, not cobbles. Skinless was very large.

  The avatar seemed hesitant as well. Frightened, even.

  I looked more closely at the dust. Or sand, perhaps, for it seemed I could spy coarseness. “What is it?” I asked quietly. “Salt?”

  Septio made a small noise in his throat. “Yes.”

  “Why would the avatar of a pain god fear pain? Especially when his own priests embrace it?”

  “Pain is still pain.” Septio looked around at his fellow priests, then said something I did not follow. Their temple language, I assumed.

  The one who had first acknowledged our coming nodded. Septio switched back to Petraean. “I must go bring the avatar to the god. The Pater Primus will pray for your teacher’s release. Another sacrifice will be offered in her place. This should be sufficient.”

  “Should be?”

  His eyes met mine with a cool amusement. “When are the doings of gods ever certain?”

  Septio passed out of the circle into the shadows at the back of the hall. I remained with the priests, who continued to ignore me. Instead we all watched the pool. In time, the salt storm collapsed to a swirl of pale crystals on the ground. Without turning his head, the avatar reached behind and grasped the Dancing Mistress’ ankle. He dragged her through the swirl to an iron door. There he banged his fist three times.

  I was surprised to hear the echo of hammering from where Septio had just passed. None of the priests seemed troubled, so I held my tongue.

  The door opened with a horrid creak I could he
ar all too readily. Of course, who would oil the hinges that closed such monsters out?

  Visible in the pool, Septio stood in Skinless’ way. His face was also masked with the horizontal leather strips, and he held a narrow iron rod high in one hand, where the avatar could see it. I realized the hook on the end was bone. Which made a kind of sense, since I had already learned at great cost that this thing could not be touched or turned by ordinary weapons.

  What froze my heart was that Septio’s other hand grasped the long blond hair of a nude boy who was covered with small red scabs. The boy’s eyes were shut and his mouth hung open.

  Tapping Skinless with the rod, Septio turned and walked out of the view. He dragged the boy with him. The avatar followed, dragging the Dancing Mistress. I heard the footfalls from the darkness beyond us.

  The temple language echoed loudly. Septio made some prayer or address to Blackblood. The words were harsh to my ears, a tongue fit for pain. A great, slow syllable rumbled in reply, from a voice so deep, I felt the sound in my ribs and gut.

  Around me, the priests sighed. Then there was silence.

  I waited for whatever came next. The small pool was now so much dead silver, no different from the large one at the center of the sanctuary. The priests still stood as if expecting more.

  After a while, Septio walked out of the darkness. His hands were empty—no iron rod, no Dancing Mistress, nothing. My fingers slipped down to the haft of my knife. Where is she?

  I must have growled, for when Septio slipped off his mask, he seemed surprised. He turned the leather over nervously within his grasp before looking up at me. “Your teacher lives,” he said quietly. “Can you find a healer of her people?”

  “Yes. I would see her now.”

  “No.” This was the one I had assumed to be the Pater Primus.

  The other priests stepped away on business of their own as he stripped off his mask as well. Underneath was a slightly overfed face, skin shiny and pale in the northern fashion, his eyes hazel flecked with gold. Without the robes, he might just as easily have been a fruitier from the market.

  “You are a great deal of trouble, young woman.” His voice was ordinary, too. No hint of the god’s nature possessed him now.

  Keeping my veil in place, I answered, “The world is a great deal of trouble. I will see my teacher now.”

  “Our black moon sacrifice was taken up.”

  That did not seem to be an answer. I tried not to think about the boy, and what taken up might mean. “Where is she? Or shall I search for her myself?”

  His hand twitched. “Do not go wandering in the shadows of this temple if you wish to leave as whole as you came in.”

  “Then bring her out to me.”

  “She cannot be moved yet,” Septio said beside me.

  “I will not let you see her in any case,” the Pater Primus added. “Your path is different. I think you will have more dedication if you set your feet upon it now.”

  “You hold her hostage.” My grip on the knife was firm, though in truth, I had no notion how to fight a temple full of priests. Especially as they’d inured themselves to pain.

  “No. She will be bound over to Federo and the Interim Council, once she is ready to be moved.”

  This was his house. There was little I could do but seethe. “Then I will be away, to speed her escape from your dungeons.” I itched to find the Tavernkeep and beg a healer of him. Later I might see if I could set fire to this temple.

  The Pater Primus looked thoughtfully at Septio. “Is this one with us?”

  “I will not be your enemy once my teacher is free.” In truth I wasn’t sure of that, but this was no moment to argue.

  “She is with us,” Septio added. “For reasons of her own, not just because her hand has been forced.”

  The Pater Primus turned back to me. “I hope you carry the old spells within you, girl, because one more blade in a woman’s hand will be as one more stalk of wheat before the scythe.”

  “My blade reaches farther than you think,” I snapped. Then, to Septio: “Show me the way out.”

  We walked back through the hall without further ceremony. “This is more than we have done for anyone before,” Septio said.

  “I suppose I should thank you, but gratitude is not in me now. Not with your Pater Primus holding the Dancing Mistress so close, like a child hoarding a festival toy.” I thought on the boy again. “Besides that, we have traded life for life. I cannot feel so well about it.”

  Instead of turning into the gallery from which we had entered, Septio led me to a tall set of doors that seemed oddly familiar. I realized this was the black-faced temple that the Dancing Mistress and I had passed by.

  “You do not understand. Once again, do not presume to judge.”

  We passed down the wide steps, which were made each too small for ordinary walking. That would cause the building to look larger, and make supplicants who approached uneasy. More clever architecture. Recognizing that the thread of my thoughts sought to turn away from guilt, I refused to distract myself. “You killed a child to retrieve the Dancing Mistress,” I told him, letting my voice grow hot. “I, who have sworn a hundred silent oaths to stop the trafficking of children, allowed this to happen.”

  He paused at the bottom of the steps. “Which way will you find this healer?”

  So much for an answer to my pain. I led him west up the Street of Horizons, following the quickest path out of the Temple Quarter and in the general direction of the Tavernkeep’s quiet house.

  The great room of the nameless tavern was empty, though I smelled Selistani cooking. I ignored Septio with the hardest set of my shoulders that I could muster. I would have preferred to ignore him with my knife.

  Following the scent into the kitchen, I found Chowdry stirring something in a shallow sizzling pan, much in the Hanchu manner. He saw me and smiled shyly. “The master of the inn has found me decent seasonings in the market,” he said in Seliu. “The meats are wrong here, but close enough.” He took up a little bowl and flicked some food into it.

  Possessed by a strong desire to purge even the memory of Septio’s spiced meat from my mind, I tasted of what Chowdry had made. Goat, or possibly mutton, thin sliced and fried with sesame oil, chickpeas, red rice, and a heavy dusting of coriander. I closed my eyes and pretended for a moment I was in the refectory of the Temple of the Silver Lily.

  When I opened them, Septio was also eating. I nearly dashed the bowl from his hands. He didn’t deserve this shard of Selistan.

  “Where is the inn master?” I demanded of Chowdry. My tone was far rougher than it should have been.

  Chowdry dropped his eyes. “He is out, mistress. Meeting with the brewers, I think.”

  Which likely meant the Tavernkeep was not far away. I had no way of knowing where amid these surrounding blocks of breweries and malting houses he might be. “I require a healer of his people. For our Dancing Mistress.”

  The Selistani’s eyes widened. “Has she come to harm?”

  I did not realize Chowdry held any love for my teacher, but then, she had been kinder to him than I. “Terribly so. If the master returns without having spoken to me, tell him a healer is urgently needed at the temple of Blackblood.”

  Septio stirred at the mention of his god, for I had not made an effort to render the meaning of the name in Seliu. He set his bowl down.

  “Our man is out,” I told the priest. “I do not know where to look for him.”

  “Will you leave a note, so we can go about our business?”

  “Two years this problem has been unfolding, and now you are in a hurry?” I turned back to Chowdry. “Is there paper and pen at the bar out front?”

  He shrugged.

  “Then tell him how urgent this is, and no mistake.” As I turned away, I stopped. “Chowdry. I did not know you cooked so well. This fry is nicely done.”

  Another smile. “Who do you think fed Chittachai before you came aboard?” The memory of his lost ship chased the smile from
Chowdry’s face. The ghosts were visible in his eyes.

  Not trusting myself to speak in that moment, I gave him the first few degrees of a bow, then left the kitchen for the great room. There was still no one about, but Septio and I searched beneath the counter until we found a tally book. I tore an empty page out of the back and wrote out what I could, taking care to emphasize the seriousness.

  The Tavernkeep would not mistake the urgency, and I could only trust in the good faith of Blackblood’s priests. Which would not last any great time, most likely, but at least so long as they thought they needed me.

  You must summon the greatest healer of your people who can be found, I wrote in conclusion of the explanation I’d tried to make on the tally page. Her soulpath may be badly damaged. Her body certainly is. Also I advise you to go with many strong friends. They are very difficult in the temple.

  Septio read past my shoulder. “We are sheltering you and her both from worse hurt,” he told me.

  “Your concern is a balm upon my heart.”

  Then, because I could not stand to sit and do nothing while she suffered, we went out on the fool’s errand of finding the Tavernkeep somewhere in this quarter of the city.

  We called at every brewery and loading dock within six blocks. I touched back at the tavern between efforts, as we crossed and recrossed the neighborhood. Wherever the Tavernkeep was, we could not locate him.

  An hour or so before noon, as I was becoming almost violently frantic, Septio plucked at my elbow. “Look there,” he said. “Is that your man?”

  A pardine stalked along Gollymob Street. Not the Tavernkeep, but I knew their numbers were few enough. This one might have what I sought so desperately. I pushed after him, wishing I knew any words of their tongue.

  He must have known I was behind, because he turned before I reached him. I stopped cold.

  I had met only two of the Dancing Mistress’ people in person. They favored robes or togas in the style of Petraeans, which allowed their tails to be free. I’d seen them wear sandals. Pardines seen in public were groomed sleek and clean, and seemed to be able to slip through the human life of this city like eels through a reef.