Endurance

by Jay Lake

  Still, the titanics were so far beyond human experience. Their roots were back in the deepest time, before cities and farms and the very tongues of men. To see a titanic manifest …

  The sheer thought boggled me. I risked sainthood if anyone knew of this. If these visitations continued, I risked my own sanity.

  I needed counsel from deeper in time. Previously I’d rejected the Factor’s ghost, when contemplating how to move against Blackblood with the Eyes of the Hills in my possession. But he was the oldest person I could talk to in this city. Erio was tied to his tomb in the High Hills, so far as I knew, and besides was only a whispering voice in the shadows. I had known the Factor in life, at least a little, and held power over him in death, as it had been me who pushed him through the black door in his guise as the Duke.

  Further, when I’d last seen the Factor, he’d been standing with Mother Iron. I knew she was much older than any of us. Possibly older than Copper Downs itself. Deeper in time, indeed.

  A titanic had touched the city. A goddess had died. I still had my worries, but I strongly desired wisdom as to the meaning of these signs and portents.

  If Surali and her plots had brought about the death of Marya through some illicit alliance with the pardine Revanchists, that signified very ill indeed for the Lily Goddess. And the Bittern Court would little concern itself with my goddess’ fall. Quite the opposite, regardless of the consequences. No, I could not send the Selistani embassy home. I needed to stop them here.

  Thank the goddess I now carried the Eyes of the Hills. Surali and the Revanchists could not seal whatever bargain they’d made without these, I was confident.

  My thoughts were circling again. I slipped into an alley and located an entrance to Below.

  * * *

  I strode through an echoing gallery I had visited only a few times. This was not among my usual precincts, from the years when I ran beneath the streets of the city nightly. Coldfire gleamed in abundance on rough-chiseled walls, and I could see wide, irregular pillars holding up the roof atop which this part of the city squatted.

  One of the old copper-mine galleries, before those ancients had delved deeper and opened tunnels into the darkest places as they played out their seams. Not that any place beneath the stones wasn’t dark enough to drive any thoughtful woman to the edge of terror.

  I listened, as one does Below. Water dripped in a dozen places or more. The air seemed to breathe slightly. No footfalls, no clink of metal, no shallower breathing of meaty lungs. That didn’t rule out ghosts, avatars, or the other supernatural detritus that clung to the underside of this city like currants in a scone.

  But then, it was ghosts and avatars I’d been searching for.

  Long experience suggested that calling out names was an invitation to unpleasantness. So I headed toward the machines that bulked oily and rusted in the spaces beneath the Temple of Endurance. The Factor or Mother Iron either one could find me far more easily than I could find them.

  And right then, to their perceptions, I must have reeked of the scent of divine magic. Even without the touch of Desire, the Eyes of the Hills would draw them like a fire on the ocean at night.

  Traveling Below was very much a matter of listening, smelling, and thinking with senses other than the eyes. There was a lesson to be drawn from that process, which was surely part of the reason the Dancing Mistress had taken me Below in the first instance. I walked with lids half shut, hearing how my careful, soft footfalls echoed in the velvety darkness beyond the pallid, witchy glow of the coldfire. The damp, luminescent moss clung mucky to my fingers. I knew that in the complete, natural darkness of Below my eyes would soon enough invent terrors of their own if I did not give them soft shadows to see around the corners of.

  When something sparked beyond the pale shell of my coldfire, my heart lurched. I’d been expecting a visitor, wanting one, but still …

  Mother Iron’s eyes as always resembled distant furnaces, fires banked on a hillside at dusk. I had never seen her face, only her cowl, but I still felt as if I could reach past the hem of her garment and touch another world. Relaxing my pace, I slowed to meet her.

  The Factor’s ghost was not about. This surprised me slightly. They’d been together the last time I’d seen them. Others moved through this place, but the usual practice was to avoid if possible, or pass quickly and quietly if not. Only those of us who had business here met on purpose.

  “Greetings, Mother Iron,” I said as politely as I could. The Dancing Mistress had made it very clear to me that this was one of the old, great powers of Copper Downs, for all that she kept herself cloaked and damped down to nearly a cinder.

  “Green.” Her voice carried that same rustiness I had always associated with Mother Iron, a sense of something vast breathing from far away. And hot, as well.

  “I had hoped to meet you here.” I could not decide if I was a supplicant, a petitioner, or even in some strange way a peer to her. Mother Iron always moved to her own will, and seemed utterly indifferent to whoever and whatever surrounded her.

  “You bear the weight of history.”

  My right hand strayed to my belly. For one odd moment, I thought she meant the child. Then I realized she must be referring to the Eyes of the Hills.

  “History threatens to return and weigh upon us all, Mother Iron.”

  She huffed. A sigh? I waited, to see what else she might say. Speaking with her was something like playing the traveler’s game. Finally: “That price was already paid. More than once.”

  “I would not know what was paid before, Mother Iron. I only know what is balanced in the scales this day. And this day I have a problem older than the time in which it comes to me.”

  “Older time comes for you. The elder days of Copper Downs seek to return.”

  That made some sense. Erio was stirring for reasons beyond the latest problems in the succession of seats on the Interim Council. Of course, that kingly ghost could have been yapping his head off for centuries and I would not have known the difference. Somehow I suspected that Ilona would have understood, and mentioned it. “I have taken these gems from a fool, who would have used them to bribe greater fools. But they are not of this city.”

  She rumbled again: “That price was already paid.”

  Softly, I said, “I know. And Desire rises here. Her daughter Marya is slain.”

  “Another power from an older time. Only the oldest wisdoms can save this city from its oldest threats.”

  With that nearly pointless advice, she turned away and vanished between one step and the next. Whether it was only the darkness swallowing her and the black cowl she wore, or a more ghostly disappearance, I could not say. Most of the time, ordinary folk in ordinary bodies were sadly outnumbered Below.

  I wondered how it had been for the miners, back in the morning of the world. Had they broken open the crust of the world only to find a population of haunts and legends already awaiting them? Or had they brought their fears with them on first creating the Below?

  Musing so, I nearly ran into a man who seemed altogether flesh and blood. My short knife flashed into my right hand—it was rare for anyone to achieve such a complete advantage of surprise over me. I kept my point from his throat, though, for already I knew this was no attack.

  “Excuse me.” His nervous voice was thin, reedy, as a boy not quite grown to his prime, though he seemed tall enough in the glow of my coldfire.

  That was such an unlikely response to having a blade pulled that I had to laugh. Stepping back, I gave him room, and looked at my involuntary captive.

  “I am sorry,” I said. “You startled me. This is unusual.”

  His head pumped vigorously as he nodded. I was pretty sure he was male. For one thing, no woman with any decent sense of herself would wear such a hideous mask. His head was wrapped in bands of leather over which were affixed two goggle-eyed lenses and a tiny, sputtering lamp between them so faint I could not see the use of it. His mouth was covered with a verdigrised brass muzzle
with needled teeth set into it, that last detail seemingly just for the look of the thing. He wore musty dark robes and a heavy leather belt creaking with tools and devices.

  Had I seen him before hearing his voice, I might have found him threatening. Instead I realized I faced a man dressed as a kind of mummer. A boy, really, with a man’s height.

  “Y-you are Green?”

  I didn’t think he meant that as a question. “Yes, I am Green.” Now he was making me nervous. “I do not know you.”

  “Mother Iron called me to y-you.”

  The tulpa had just left me moments ago, but that did not mean she had not spoken to this boy-man, perhaps hours ago. Or even years. I’d long since understood that her rules were not my own.

  “Who are you?” I asked gently, hefting my short knife for emphasis.

  “I am Archimandrix.”

  Now there was pride in his voice. Pride of place, pride of purpose, pride of self. I could hear it. I knew that pride, from when I had been a Lily Blade. Only a Lily Blade, I corrected myself.

  “And what does an Archimandrix do? Besides heed the call of Mother Iron?” I was not so sure I would, or could, ignore her call should Mother Iron choose to speak through me.

  “I lead the oldest guild,” he squeaked. Archimandrix cleared his throat and tried again. “I am the master of the sorcerer-engineers.”

  Frankly I would have doubted if he had mastery of a bathtub, but I’d long given up on judging people from their seemings. How many had failed and died owing to wrongly judging me on my seeming, after all? And how many more yet would?

  But the sorcerer-engineers? I was to learn that they were in truth guardians of ancient wisdom, but at that moment I did not know them from dunny divers. “I do not recognize your guild. And I have studied the old Duke’s lists.” Thanks to Mistress Danae’s careful instruction and endless books during my days in the Factor’s house, I could name even of some of the most obscure guilds, such as the Brotherhood of Lens Grinders, and the Worshipful Order of Loom Mechanics.

  “You know us from the brass-ape races.” There was that pride again.

  “I know of those races,” I said cautiously. “I’d always assumed them sponsored and designed by men in little workshops about the city.”

  “Well, of course.” His tone was quite reasonable. “Those men in little workshops are us. The sorcerer-engineers. Our true craft is much deeper and older. The brass apes are how we enter into the life of the city. The work excuses and covers up many of our other tasks.”

  That I could imagine. That work could excuse and cover up almost any other task. Still, this Archimandrix was not an easy man to speak with. As if he followed a script in his head that had not been written to include me. Further patient prompting was indicated. “Why did Mother Iron call you to me?”

  “Sh-she said I might need you.”

  That he might need me, I thought. Not the other way around. Curious. “That may well be true.” I kept my voice slow, in order to trail behind my thoughts. Was this about the Eyes of the Hills? “I might need you in turn.” Perhaps. “Tell me more of your true craft.”

  “Those are secrets closely guarded down the generations,” he said dubiously, still speaking from his place of pride.

  In those words, I realized Archimandrix would not be turned by threat of force, weak as this one sounded in other ways. He possessed a steel core beneath the tissue of confusion that wrapped his surface.

  I could admire that.

  “There is nothing I can say to you,” I told him, “which would be convincing of my credentials if you do not already believe in them. I do not know how Mother Iron calls you, or what that call means to a sorcerer-engineer. I can hardly claim to understand her myself. Only that I know Mother Iron has guarded this city down those long generations over which your secrets have been kept. And that she accepts something of me into her domain here Below.”

  He scratched his chin through the leather wrappings, nudging one dark nail up beneath the needle-toothed brass muzzle. “You have the right of it there. You speak with the sharpness of a logic-chopper, but the sense of your words is not so pointed toward tearing into my argument.”

  “I can chop logic well enough,” I demurred. “I was in the custody of sharp-minded teachers for a long while. This is not my day for the razor of truth. Please, either tell me what you will, or bid me farewell, so that I may pass about my urgent business.”

  Archimandrix sighed theatrically. “Fair enough.” He turned half away, facing my direction toward the gallery beneath the Temple of Endurance. “Walk with me?”

  “Of course.” I slipped my weapon away and wondered precisely what it was that Mother Iron saw in this ungainly youth with his core of power and pride.

  * * *

  “The sorcerer-engineers are the oldest guild, but we have been undeclared since the fall of the kings.”

  Eight centuries past, in my understanding of that history. “You were driven underground?”

  “We took ourselves there,” Archimandrix said distantly. I had the impression that if I but asked he would burst into recitation, chanting a list of kings and guildmasters like a memory man in the Dockmarket. “Once our guildhall was the proudest in the city. Where the Ducal Palace now stands, on Montane Street. Some of our old walls are still contained within those newer ones.”

  Ah, the gnostic entanglements of conspiracy and architecture. “Ancient secrets wrapped in modern confidences.”

  He glanced sidelong at me. For a moment, the trembling, foolish youth was in abeyance. “Some secrets are never unwrapped by those who follow later on. The Dukes were not always as the latest and last was.”

  Is he aware of my central role in the assassination!? “I would know nothing of the late Duke,” I lied, the memory of his death at my hand blooming painfully in my mind.

  “When the last king was pulled from his throne by the Varingii raiders and their pardine allies, the master of our guild at that time allowed himself to be taken as well in order to give out that the rest of our order had been eliminated. The banners were burned then, and our name stamped out.”

  I could well imagine that scene, unfortunately. Which led me to wonder where the Royal Palace had stood, if the Ducal Palace was on the site of their old guildhall. Or had they been one and the same? “Even the bravest men will fall before a surging tide of swords,” I said, quoting the historian Benefactus.

  “But the most patient will wait for the storm to clear,” Archimandrix responded unthinking.

  Obviously we’d read the same books.

  With an audible effort at realigning his thoughts, the sorcerer-engineer continued: “Even then our guild was very old. Our earlier … functions … had grown dormant. When this city was called Cupraneum and men with a different color of skin and eyes lived here, we were great. The Years of Brass were our time. The mines grew ever deeper, as secrets were imparted by the gods above and the powers below.”

  It seemed he meant “powers below” literally. I would receive my litany whether I wished it or not. Mother Iron had urged me upon this strange man. It was incumbent on me not just to listen, but even to draw him out.

  “We built machines to work the mines, to provide air and light and wondrous goods to the city. Though they are long since abandoned, most of their purposes forgotten even by us, still our guild tends those machines.” His voice was sad now, tinged with the twinned losses of history and time. “Now in these late days, we sorcerer-engineers mine the old ways for scraps of knowledge. Steam-kettle ships cross the oceans on the wings of the learning of newer, lesser men. Some of them even bear light as we once did. All our city can do is buy goods over their sides and stare longingly at the iron hulls and the growling power to sail against the wind.”

  He was pushing me into the precincts of my own memory. “I have traveled aboard those steam-kettle ships,” I told him.

  “They were not built by us as we might once have done. Our pride is in our past. The future comes speaki
ng another language, seen first by foreign eyes.” That sadness had taken him over completely.

  “And those are your deeper mysteries? Care of machines whose purposes you have forgotten?”

  “Yes.”

  The sheer, simple grief in his voice moved me. I was seeking wisdom from the depths of time. Mother Iron had delivered me into the hands of an odd young man who quite literally saw himself as the warden of those depths.

  We had arrived at the gallery below the temple. Light filtered in from above, but much more dimly than recent memory suggested. I looked up the ladder that led to the surface. The acolytes had built a platform over the hole in the middle of their temple yard.

  I bristled. There had better flaming well be a door set in that platform, or they’d see some divine wrath.

  “We keep many old secrets, but those are our core.” Archimandrix sounded despondent now. He looked up, following my gaze. “You will need us soon. I am sure of it.”

  I of all people understood the weight of history, but I was not ready to submit myself to the depressed recollections of this holdout from another age. He was probably right. I would need them soon. But I did not need them today. Lost knowledge of ancient mines and kettle ships from another age would do little to address whatever had passed between me and Desire in the ruins of Marya’s temple. I was looking for wisdom in the fruits of the wrong tree.

  Neither would this one’s metallurgy and delving relieve me from Blackblood’s demands. Whatever magic these sorcerer-engineers carried with them, it had nothing to do with the Eyes of the Hills. I was certain of that much.

  This was not divinity, nor even magic. This was tool using, elevated to a mystic rite then buried as all mystic rites are wont to be.

  “How will I find you if I need you?” I fought the urge to dismiss Archimandrix and his obsession with ancient, rusted lore. It was important for me to trust Mother Iron that much, to believe that I would need this man and his guild again. She did not flow through the world as Archimandrix or I did; she might have seen a requirement years in coming, or moments away. I could only hope that I would know when.