Endurance

by Jay Lake

  “To be speaking with you.”

  “I’m not going anywhere near the Selistani embassy again. Not without plentiful swords at my back.” The memory of Mother Vajpai in the process of taking me down was still fresh. Samma, too. “Did she limp?”

  “She walked with a cane.”

  Hah.

  * * *

  As Chowdry moved on to his tasks, I returned to consideration of my own troubles. Comfortably seated on the wooden temple’s steps in warm daylight, I found that they did not seem so bad. Osi and Iso were not my friends, not in any meaningful sense, but their wise and disinterested counsel had already opened my eyes to certain nuances of the situation. If Samma truly was looking for me, I could turn her against the pardines, and perhaps the other way around.

  That mutual leverage appealed to my sense of orderliness, but it also felt like a double betrayal. The pardines, even the Revanchists, were not my enemies. Nor would it be fair to think of them as enemies of Copper Downs. If they were fighting anything, the Revanchists struggled against the weight of history and the tangled mass of their own resentments.

  If I were not careful, I could make a true enemy out of once-friendly strangers. And in the Dancing Mistress’ case, much more than that to me.

  Likewise the Selistani embassy. I was nothing to the Prince of the City. Mother Vajpai could not have turned on me so thoroughly, I simply didn’t believe that; she must be playing a deeper, doubled game. Or redoubled, perhaps. Only Surali, the Bittern Court woman, was seriously out to overset me and bring me low.

  Now if I could manage to focus her and Blackblood on one another, I might truly be free.

  All that made me wish I’d explained myself to Iso and Osi better, that they might have given me wiser counsel now.

  A motion in the edge of my vision made me glance up. I saw Samma walking toward me. She definitely limped badly. When she realized that I was looking at her, she halted.

  “I believe I kicked you in the belly,” I said by way of greeting. This was not a moment likely to incline me to charity.

  “Yes. You nearly dislocated my hip.” She grimaced. “I have bruised black as a coal demon’s face.”

  “Surely you have not been loitering outside the gate?”

  “I was not bid to wait here for you. I have been to a kava house three times so far to while away the hours.”

  That there was a kava house anywhere near our gate was news to me. I continued to peer up at her, deliberately not inviting her to sit. “You would have betrayed me, alongside Mother Vajpai. Why should I welcome you, even as a negotiator? Especially so?”

  Samma looked miserable—sad and nervous, her regrets writ upon her face in the not-so-secret language of her heart. “You have no reason. B-but I have tried to bring you some.”

  Resting my hands on my belly, I considered that. Soon I would be too pregnant to fight properly—terribly unbalanced, for one. Then even this weak sister would take me down. Better to listen for a while, perhaps. I resolved to consider new attack strategies even as we spoke. In a way, I was maturing, though then I would have scarcely admitted to a need for such. “Illuminate me, Blade.”

  She almost shuddered at my words. “I departed Kalimpura less than a month after you. Aboard a ship called Atchaguli. Sister hull to poor Chittachai.”

  That was very interesting news, indeed. I bent forward, thinking hard. “To what errand?” I asked softly.

  Samma glanced about almost theatrically. She would never do for a spy, or even a decent lookout. “Mother Vajpai put me on your track. The Lily Goddess wanted you to return to Copper Downs.”

  Suspicious now, I probed. “The Lily Goddess? Not the Bittern Court?”

  “Th-that happened later. After I left.” Her misery deepened. “Please, may I sit with you?”

  I relented and patted the step next to me. Samma stumbled over and lowered herself painfully. It was like watching a woman of seventy-six instead of sixteen.

  “Did I truly kick you that hard?” I asked softly, my fingers brushing along her thigh.

  “You kicked me so hard that Mother Argai probably felt it.”

  “I am sorry.” Surprisingly, I found I meant that. “I was rushed.”

  “I know. We wronged you.”

  We. “Whose idea was it to take me hostage?”

  “L-let me tell it from the beginning. As I understand the tale, at least.”

  I could not help myself; I leaned over and hugged my very first lover ever. “Speak, friend,” I whispered in her ear. She even smelled like home.

  “Weeks I voyaged aboard Atchaguli. Until we caught up with Chittachai. The crews knew one another—Captain Padma was cousin to Captain Utavi, I think.”

  Was cousin. She gave away a great deal in her assumptions and phrasing. “How was Chittachai when you found her?” I asked gently.

  “Still floating,” Samma replied absently. “Then. Utavi was an ass, but he took me aboard. Made me prove myself with that poor giant of his.”

  “Tullah.”

  “Yes.” Our eyes met, and hers shone with something like gratitude. She’d understood my tone. “I fought the man. A large baby, in truth.”

  I thought sadly on Tullah, whom I had liked. “Grown enough for Utavi’s hungers.”

  “Mayhap. It was the captain’s hungers that did us in. However else you left him, you also left him angry. I thought he’d sold you. Instead he made to sell me. The crew tried to ambush me after a while, meaning to bind me over to someone searching for you.”

  Now we come to the crux of the matter. “What happened?” I circled her with my arm again.

  “I k-killed them all. Except for Little Baji. B-but Atchaguli was close by. They would know my deeds, and ch-chase me. So Little Baji and I took the boat deep into the southern sea, to wait among the shipping lanes.”

  Keeping myself very still, I asked, “You killed Tullah?”

  “N-no. He died defending me. I did kill the others, including Utavi.” She rubbed her hand at some remembered injury. Or blow.

  “How did you make it from an empty ship on the open ocean to here?”

  “We were picked up in the shipping lanes by Winter Solace. Bound for Kalimpura to transport the Selistani embassy. I came back to the docks at her rail only to meet Mothers Vajpai and Argai.” Her misery seemed to deepen. “They never even let me return to shore. I suppose I know too much now.”

  “Too much of what?”

  “Of your story! Of you!” Samma’s voice pitched up sharply, the anger of a little girl. “It is always you at the heart of everything. It’s you who the mothers gossip about and linger to say how much they miss. No one cared half so much when Jappa was killed by that drunken carter.”

  I did not know Jappa had died. Some impulse to guilt surged briefly inside me, but I pushed it aside. “I am sorry,” I told her.

  “Of course you are. Green the magnificent. Green the perfect. There was never a better fighter nor a more goddess-favored aspirant than you!” She took a deep, shuddering breath, trying to calm herself.

  “None of that was earned by me.” My voice pitched soft, trying to reach past her anger. Not to soothe, but only so that she could hear what I was saying. “Nor wanted. I was never consulted.”

  Samma sniffed. “None of us were ever consulted. We only did as we could. When old Mother Umaavani died, the goddess spoke through her last breaths. She wants you back.”

  “She sent me away,” I said bitterly, wondering who the new Temple Mother was with Mother Umaavani passed on.

  “Politics,” muttered Samma. “Even now. Especially now. Whatever you did to the Bittern Court has not faded from their memories. They hate you beyond reason.”

  “Hate me enough to suborn Mother Vajpai and chase me across an ocean? Who has been named to Umaavani’s office? And who could care so much?”

  “Mother Srirani.”

  One of the senior Justiciary Mothers. I’d barely ever spoken to her, but she was a traditionalist, I knew. The Blades h
ad not cared for her so much. Someone whose will could be turned against Mother Vajpai, then.

  “As for who could care so much … well, Surali could.” Samma took a breath, then blurted as if she were afraid of her own words: “That woman has been bargaining with certain parties—maybe those cat people of yours—for aid in some affair the Bittern Court pursues. I cannot say what it is. They always talk in whispers, using little codes. I don’t think even Mother Vajpai knows the story. Just that her hand was forced, and the Temple Mother’s, to come here and reclaim you.”

  And so now we arrive at why the Revanchists have descended from their quiet hills and announced themselves, I thought. A ship-borne flow of prior messages had arranged the apparent coincidence of their presence here at this time. “But Surali is not here for me? She is here in pursuit of this other bargain?”

  “Oh, she will take you as bonus and be quite pleased with herself, if she can.”

  “So why are you here?” I asked.

  “They would never let me off Winter Solace.”

  “No, why are you here now, with me? Instead of plotting my capture with Mother Vajpai.”

  Samma looked pained. “Mother Vajpai came to this city in large part because the Temple Mother thought it far better you be taken by your sisters than by the Bittern Court and their Street Guild toughs.”

  “I thought the Lily Goddess wanted me back?”

  “She does. But the goddess did not pay for this expedition.”

  “So you Blades serve two masters.” As usual, I thought with nasty glee. I knew myself to be unfair. Too bad.

  “We s-serve two intentions, say rather.”

  That line sounded rehearsed to me. I wondered how much of this little errand Mother Vajpai had put Samma up to. There seemed small point in asking. I hugged her gently again, recalling the best of our times together in the Blade aspirants’ dormitory. “And you came only to tell me this?”

  “Mother Vajpai and I fought,” she said in a rush.

  “I doubt that, as you are still walking.”

  “N-no! Hard words, not sparring. I-I think this bargaining Surali does is aimed at the Lily Goddess. M-Mother Vajpai does not believe me.”

  Samma never was one for holding strong ideas of her own, not when there was someone of character nearby to follow along with. I wondered how she’d hit upon this notion, and held to it in the face of Mother Vajpai’s demurral. “Why do you know this?”

  “I don’t know it,” she said, her voice laced with misery. “I th-think it. Some of the ways they talked aboard the ship. How Surali glares at me, as if she could hit me to bruise you. The old rivalry between the Bittern Court and the Temple of the Silver Lily.”

  The Lily Blades certainly had their own rivalry with the Street Guild of Kalimpura, which was itself closely allied to the Bittern Court. The Bittern Court controlled the docks, took in moorage fees and levied excise on goods coming and going. Enormous amounts of ready money passed back and forth in those endeavors. The Street Guild were essentially licensed footpads, keeping the general peace against freelancers in return for the freedom to conduct shakedowns and outright muggings of their own.

  That latter rivalry was obvious enough—weapons carriers against weapons carriers, each with a very different notion of justice and fairness. But the rivalry between the Temple of the Silver Lily and Bittern Court went back well before my time in Kalimpura, rooted in long-ago betrayals and old hatreds of which I knew nothing.

  Would they truly plot to bring down a goddess? Who thought in those terms?

  Me, for one, I realized with unintended irony. I’d done for Choybalsan myself, although with a great deal of help. And someone had laid a trap for Marya not long after I had first fled Copper Downs.

  That was who Surali was looking for. With whom was she bargaining? The Rectifier? Somehow god killing didn’t quite seem his mode. He had priests to hunt, but that was a different matter.

  But what of the rest of the Revanchists? My blood ran cold. Surely the Dancing Mistress had small reason to love the Lily Goddess. There had been nothing kind about her treatment at the hands of my temple sisters and Mothers.

  It all fit together, but somehow was still too neat. I had trouble believing in this plot. Who could conspire across the breadth of an ocean, given the excruciating pace at which messages traveled? And some pieces of it had to stretch back years. The Eyes of the Hills, for example, if they were indeed involved.

  “I find it more likely that Mother Vajpai has encouraged you to think this,” I told Samma. “To bait me into her grasp once more. I will not return to her again.”

  “No, Green.” Samma sounded almost desperate now. Close to tears. “Please listen to me. The plots in the embassy are as thick as silkworm webs on a mulberry bush.”

  “That is the way of Kalimpuri politics,” I told her. “And everywhere else, too, I suppose. This does not mean some great effort is being made to slay our goddess. They work for advantage, that their names may be ascendant.”

  I was loyal to the Lily Goddess, albeit very irregular in my observances, but I was not dedicated to Her political power, or the particular fortunes of Her temple. If the Temple Mother and the Justiciary Mother and Mother Vajpai wanted to fritter their years on those disputes, it was no game of mine.

  There were gods aplenty here in Copper Downs to trouble me.

  “I-I brought you something,” Samma said, her voice very small indeed. “By way of proof.”

  She reached inside her Blade leathers and pulled forth a small velvet sack that had been lying close to her left breast. I knew how she favored that one when at play, so perhaps she had drawn comfort from having her secrets there.

  Samma hefted the sack. I could see it was light. Money? It was not so heavy, not at all. Some ancient sigil, perhaps. But when she tugged the drawstring, two gems spilled into the palm of her left hand: a green tourmaline and a cobalt spinel.

  “The Eyes of the Hills,” I whispered.

  They had returned to Copper Downs. No wonder the Revanchists were down out of their high forests and meadows. I felt ill as I realized how much of that supposed plot had to be real.

  Maybe Osi and Iso were right after all. Set the Selistani embassy and the pardine factions on one another, then simply clear the streets.

  “Where did you get those?” I asked her.

  Samma shook her head, miserable, as she tucked the Eyes of the Hills back into their velvet bag. “I h-had some gems, to barter for cash or goods or passage, as I began to pursue you. I stole these from Mother Vajpai, but left her with two other gems so she would not note the theft so quickly.”

  “You stole from Mother Vajpai?” This was not the Samma I had known.

  “I’m no longer the scared girl you dumped when you became a star among the Blades,” she said in a determined voice. “All we do is police Kalimpura, and spend our time there. When Mother Vajpai sent me after you alone, with Captain Padma and those t-terrible men, I think I learned some things. Maybe I grew up.”

  “You may not be a scared girl,” I said simply, “but you are a frightened young woman.”

  “Possibly. But I c-couldn’t just let it be. Not once I knew Mother Vajpai carried something Surali wanted real bad.”

  Ah-ha.

  “So they argued over these?”

  “Surali has been beside herself for this whole trip.”

  Which made me wonder all over again if Mother Vajpai had manipulated Samma into even this betrayal. A way to secure my help without asking me.

  Oh, the wheels inside the wheels of this were making my head ache.

  A solution of sorts came unbidden into my thoughts. “Give the gems to me.”

  She stank of a sudden surge of fear sweat, then closed her fist. “No. I might need to put them back.”

  “I can keep them far safer from Surali than Mother Vajpai can.” Which was almost certainly not literally true, but I was willing to hang on to the thought for right now. “Also, I know what to do with them, to
ensure that no harm comes to the Lily Goddess through the agency of these gems.”

  “They’re powerful, aren’t they?” Every now and then, Samma showed something of what the training mothers had seen in her. She slipped the sack back within her leathers.

  I could not allow her to leave with them. “All by themselves, perhaps not.” I grabbed hold of her wrist. “But they have the power of a symbol, and are connected to an ancient magic here in the city which has been stolen and re-stolen.”

  “They’re not yours, Green.” Samma tried to pull away from my grip.

  Tugging her toward me, I leaned in close. “They’re not yours, either. And they are dangerous.”

  Samma yanked herself almost free, rising to her feet. I came up with her, then tripped her ruthlessly by the bad leg I’d injured previously. That dumped her to the ground in front of the temple steps with a hiss of pain. I followed with a body pin of my own weight, pressing her into the graveled soil as my right hand snaked inside her leathers to retrieve the gems in their sack.

  Recovering her breath, Samma kicked up with her knee, catching me painfully in the thigh. I dug a thumb into the edge of her eye. “Do not try me further.” I was not pleased with myself, but I had neither time nor patience for her foolishness.

  She went limp, surrendering as she used to on the practice floor and in our shared bed. “Greeeeeeen,” she gasped in whining misery.

  I rolled off her and stood, wary of some last-minute trickery on her part. “Not a word of this to anyone, not even Mother Vajpai.” Especially not Mother Vajpai.

  Betrayal was written large upon Samma’s face, scratching open a sense of guilt which I rarely experienced. “I was trying to help you,” she sniffed.

  “You have.” I glanced down at the velvet bag, then tugged at the drawstring until the Eyes of the Hills spilled out once more, this time into my waiting hand. They tingled with that familiar metal-in-the-mouth feeling of something touched by the divine. It was all I could do not to glance skyward and look for the lightning strike to come.