Endurance

by Jay Lake

“No. But I can speak to Endurance as if I were still standing between his legs over a dozen summers past.”

  I stood and laid my hand flat on the ox’s nose. Closing my eyes, I thought of my grandmother’s funeral—that first memory of my life, before the days began to know their number. The bells of her silk sang the last song of her life. Endurance had plodded along, me held beside the ox in my mother’s arms.

  You were there, then, I thought. You bore me up and carried me forward and preserved my history for me until I was ready to write the book myself. Walk with me now.

  I caressed the face, from the spot between the eyes down the length of the nose. The horns hung close. I remembered their near-pearlescence in the fiery Selistani sunlight, how on certain days Papa would tip them with woven red balls, one to each side.

  I am here, I told the god. Come to me.

  Chowdry murmured something, but I did not hear his words. The god was warm and close. As I had before, I could feel him. Wordless, of course, mute as any ox, but filled with intention and divine regard.

  How have the pardines changed you? I wondered. Do you feel their high, hidden groves; the violence of their Hunts? Pardine power had twisted Federo well past the breaking point, and birthed the strange, short-lived war god Choybalsan. But if an ox was anything, he was a reservoir of calm. A sink for what might have boiled over from a lesser god. A more facile deity.

  Sunlight wrapped me like a heated cloak. I smelled the warm mud of the paddies, the sweet bloom of the plantain trees. My eyes were shut, at least here, where the solid mass of the ox loomed close beside me. Flies buzzed, shit stank, and the air was hot and still, while bells tinkled from some place I could not see.

  Very far away, Chowdry spoke once more. Again I ignored him.

  I need you, I told the god.

  Wordless, the answer came and I still understood it: You will always have me.

  Too many mistakes.

  There was no response to that. In time, I opened my eyes. Chowdry sat staring sadly at me. “So it is to pray to the ox god,” he said in Seliu.

  I bristled with defensiveness. “Endurance heard me.”

  “Of course. He is being very … awake. For a god.”

  “You have obviously not met Blackblood,” I muttered. “Or Desire.”

  “When I was a boy, the gods of my village were safely quiet. We prayed and made offerings of fruit and money, but they never came looking for us.”

  “Welcome to Copper Downs. This place has been a nexus of divine power through the Duke’s rule, at least. The new order has not yet settled in. Endurance disturbs that order. Marya’s slaying disturbs it further.”

  He shrugged. “I know little of gods. Even of this god I serve.” One hand strayed unthinking to the marble muzzle of the idol. “I am not believing in Endurance. Any more than I am believing in the weather. The god just is. Like the weather.”

  “That must be true of all gods.” I stood, balancing my hands on my hips to stretch my aching back. No more rooftops for me. If further fighting was to be had, I’d best array my champions before me. I could no longer carry my own colors.

  With that thought, my next steps fell into line in my mind. Inspiration from Endurance, or just the time spent praying serving as a meditative reflection? It did not matter. I must finish organizing my attacks.

  Surali’s other men were somewhere in the city. Possibly coming here. My little mob of sailors and refugees could barely be counted upon to watch the embassy, let alone influence its doings. Even with Mother Argai in their midst to lend them both spine and purpose. But if I entreated Archimandrix to set his brass apes onto Surali and the Street Guild instead of Iso and Osi, I could enlist my other allies, who were better suited to the task, to stop the twins. The Rectifier had been watching them for me. I would need him, and through him, some way to secure the temporary loyalty of the Revanchists. Sundering their alliance with the Selistani embassy would be a wise, wise move.

  All of this would serve to save Blackblood. Even more so, it would protect the Lily Goddess. And through Her, Desire.

  “I shall call upon you,” I told the ox.

  There was no answer, as befitted a mute and wordless god.

  Outside the weather had reverted to sleet. Needles of icy rain whipped across the temple grounds as if a divine seamstress exerted her chilly wrath. I wrapped my robe close and walked through the construction project to the trapdoor covering my ladder. Chowdry trailed behind me. “You will be having a care,” he said in Petraean.

  “I will.” Turning, I drew him into an awkward embrace. We had never been friends of the touching kind. “Surali’s men may come here under arms. I beg you to make a defense.”

  “No,” he said simply. “Our innocence is our defense.”

  “But you are guilty of so much,” I whispered.

  His smile was odd and sad.

  I turned, opened the trapdoor in the temporary deck, and descended once more into Archimandrix’s realm.

  * * *

  This time, Below was much warmer and noisier than my recent experience would have it. Perhaps that was only contrast to the dedicated misery of the weather above. Several of the ancient machines in this mine gallery hummed and clattered. Another thing I had not seen or known of before. Blue sparks wafted around the floor—coldfire, in many hands. Some had been set into gonfalons or lantern-topped poles.

  The sorcerer-engineers were preparing for war.

  I reached the bottom of my ladder to be confronted by two figures with leather-wrapped faces, eyes goggled and mouths muzzled. It occurred to me that with their guises these priests could be any race of human. Petraean. Selistani. Or something older and more furtive. They were accompanied by a brass ape that shivered and clicked. Though I was certain about the ape, I had to assume the other two were men. No woman I knew would allow herself to smell so.

  Neither of them appeared to be Archimandrix, but that was hard to tell with the tattered robes and the leather straps and the brass oculae.

  “I am Green,” I announced in my most imperious voice.

  The men nodded. The ape just clicked some more. When they turned to walk away, the ape followed them. So I followed the ape. Its great legs pistoned like the armatures of an engine. Something hissed within—however they had powered this thing, the magic or natural science of it was beyond me.

  A regiment of these armored suits would have its uses in defense, but I could not imagine them being effective attackers at the best of times. Defeating them would not be easy work, but the tactics could not be too challenging.

  Could they?

  We arrived at a machine that glowed the color of coldfire. The faint blue light crackled along the device’s brass and iron limbs. A man was strapped within. His body was gaunt, each rib as countable as a tooth, his penis dangling shriveled from a groin tattooed in concentric triangles that ran across his thighs and abdomen. His chest was tattooed as well, tiny letters in a script I didn’t recognize scrawled across his body in a testament to … what?

  Only his face was hidden, wrapped in leather with the brass eyepieces.

  Archimandrix, of course. I stared up into the gleaming blue formlessness of his lenses. “I have returned.”

  “Ah,” he gasped, then shrieked fit to split the heavens.

  I covered my ears until the piercing noise dropped off. The two beside me did not stir, though the brass ape clanked and settled a bit in its stance. When Archimandrix was finished, he gasped again before licking at the blood trailing from the corners of his mouth.

  “Your mysteries are deeper than those I know of,” I said politely.

  One of my guides reached up and began to unbuckle the bonds holding Archimandrix into his machine. After a moment he stumbled to the cold stone floor, dropping to his knees to retch. His back was covered with the same tiny scribing as his front. The skin there was spotted with welling drops of blood where a hundred or more needles had punctured him in the machine’s embrace. Nausea grabbed at me. I tu
rned away and tried to hold down a sympathetic lurch, but I lost my own battle.

  When I turned back, mouth tainted with stinging bile, the sorcerer-engineer was pulling on a quilted robe. “I am sorry,” he said in a strangely normal voice. “You should not have seen that.” Fluid dripped from his brass muzzle. I reflected on how difficult it would be to vomit in such a contraption.

  “I have decided I do not need to know.” My fervor stained my voice. If Archimandrix noted it, he did not remark.

  “We have brought all the apes out of storage.” One of his silent assistants handed the sorcerer-engineer a small wire brush, which he used to clean his muzzle as we continued to speak. The rasping of the tool lent his voice a strange distortion. “Some of our best have been working on their punchleather instructions.”

  “Are you ready?” I asked. My fear that Surali might pack up her embassy and leave was growing stronger. They held three hostages of great import to me behind those walls.

  Archimandrix waved one hand, as if brushing off objections. “We will never be as prepared as we might prefer, but we are ready.”

  I realized that his fellows were gathering around us as we spoke. Fair enough. They should all hear this. Time for my vision to begin falling into place. “We spoke before of the twins and the temples. But I have rethought my plans. Tonight, in the middle watch, I want your apes to surround the Selistani embassy. It is a rented mansion in the Haito style, at the corner of Ríchard Avenue and Knightspark Street. There may be some of my countrymen out front, watching the place; and a woman of my order named Mother Argai. She speaks no Petraean. Some of the men do. Together they are watching the gates for a departure. I must recover two other women of my order as well as a young girl from imprisonment by the embassy guards.”

  “We are to attack them?” Archimandrix asked. The flickering blue light of the place lent him eerie highlights.

  “Almost certainly, though do not swarm the walls or break through the gates. Rather, stop them if they attempt to leave. They will seek to make their way to the port. I cannot have them taking ship until I have recovered my people, and put an end to … certain plans.”

  “Your god killers.” His voice was flat now, flat as his machines.

  “My god killers,” I said, owning up to Iso and Osi. “I have other intentions for them now. More, well, spiritual. Along an axis of power where their strength does not lie.” Pardines, and Endurance. And, by the Wheel, Mother Iron if I could find her and once more truckle any sort of aid from her. She was the soul of this city, I had come to believe almost literally so.

  A strange notion was dawning about her. I wanted to let my deeper thoughts tease the idea out before I plucked at it. “The twins cannot be allowed to take ship either. Too much is at stake.”

  “We have not moved openly in the city for centuries,” Archimandrix said. “And never against our own.”

  “These are not your own. I am asking you to take on my people, not Petraeans. Besides…” I could not help the grin that seized my face. “The Interim Council will bear all costs or charges arising from these actions. I am driving inimical forces out of the city at their commission.”

  That was about as far from the truth as I cared to venture, for all that it was not yet exactly a lie.

  Archimandrix looked back at his gathered sorcerer-engineers. “What say you brothers?”

  “Much is at stake,” I put in. “If we do not act, the Interim Council will fall.” If it has not already done so. Lampet had raised the Reformed Council to be met with an aggravated helplessness by the assembled sages at the Textile Bourse. “The Temple Quarter will be in disarray yet again. Even worse, the greatest danger to order which has been seen in an age will prosper here.” Before passing onward to wreck my own city. After wrecking my own city. I was indeed a woman under two banners, however much I sought to deny either or both of them. I cradled my belly with my hands. “I want more for my daughter. Each of you wants more for yourself.”

  A rumbling arose, the sorcerer-engineers speaking a language unknown to me. Short, sharp gutturals echoed, offset by vowels that buzzed as if they used the cords deep in their throats without benefit of lips or tongue. I knew a chaffer when I heard one. The Blades used to do this on occasion. We would meet as a body to overwhelm a difficult decision with dozens of individual voices, separate opinions, smoothing together like rocks in a sand barrel until they’d reached a consensus as if by summoning it from the very air.

  Much more quickly than I’d imagined, the muttering died down. Archimandrix turned to me. “We will be there. How will we know your hostages?”

  “Two women of my order,” I said. “Prisoners on the second storey, last I was aware. Everyone there but a few servants will be my countrymen, so do not assume that any dark-skinned female is your goal. The names of these women are Mother Vajpai and Samma. Also, a girl of about twelve, of your country. She is pale, with sandy hair in curls, and eyes somewhere between blue and gray. Her name is Corinthia Anastasia. The women will be expecting a rescue, and can be relied upon. The girl is not so wise or prepared, I should think.”

  “Will you wait with us while we ready ourselves?”

  “No, I must sort my other allies.” I glanced up the ladder, and decided I’d be better off heading for the Tavernkeep’s place through Below. Too many up top knew me, might be looking for me. Besides, that way I could watch for Mother Iron.

  Or Skinless.

  I could not decide if I wanted to see Blackblood’s avatar or not. That hand I would let fate deal to me.

  “Farewell.” Archimandrix bowed deeply. Behind him, dozens of his fellows followed his obeisance in a rustling of robes and a creaking of leather. Their lenses flashed with the faint blue-white of coldfire reflections as they rose again, each head moving in an eerie, precise unison with all the others.

  “Farewell.” I pushed through them toward a familiar passage leading east and south.

  * * *

  Several turns away, in the Station, I stopped and pulled out my short knife. I needed Mother Iron, and I could not be sure she’d find me of her own accord. Whatever ritual might call her wasn’t something I knew, either, but I thought I could summon the Factor’s ghost. And he was definitely allied with Mother Iron.

  Libations are the oldest ceremony. Warriors had honored their dead from history’s first battlefield, just as families honored their elders who had taken the longest sleep. The wine of a libation poured into the opened soil was nothing more than a symbol for blood spilled in combat to run into a freshly dug grave.

  I had no wine, and the earth beneath my feet was stone, but blood I did have. The blade fit my right hand as well as ever it did, then turned around to slice across my left palm. I clenched my fist around the stinging pain. Blood filled the cup of my hand in a sickening rush.

  When I opened my fingers, the red pattered down upon the floor in a slow, silken rain, black as old sin in this underground darkness. “Factor,” I whispered. “You are never so far from me. You stand behind all the great conspiracies of my life. Even now in death the shadow of your power writhes through this city, drawing gods and god killers and assassins from across the sea. In name of my debt to you and in the name of your debt to me, I call you now.”

  It was no ritual, but the words felt right. I’d known the man in life, and I’d known him better in death, as he had passed over at my hand. We were bound as surely as any parent and child.

  “What debt do I now owe you?” The Factor loomed next to me as if he’d been there all along. He still wore his semblance of living, though I could faintly glimpse the stone of the passageway through his body.

  “You owe me your life,” I told him.

  “Which you took unknowing. I do not see that as debt.”

  “I released you from an ancient power not your own, and freed you into the next world.”

  He laughed gently. “You always were one with novel ideas about how things work.”

  “Where do you suppose I l
earned them?” In a strange way I felt almost sympathetic toward this man, the source of all my torments.

  “We all make mistakes.”

  Nodding, I agreed, “I am doubtless making another mistake now. I need your help.”

  “You? Slayer of dukes and gods? I thought you ate cities for breakfast.”

  “No. I eat rulers for breakfast. Cities give me indigestion.”

  “How shall I ease the rumbling in your gut, Emerald?”

  His use of that name very nearly closed my ears. I ignored the flash of anger that shot a tremor through my hands. “I am confronting another problem of the divine.”

  “God killing?”

  “God saving, actually.”

  “You play both sides of the fence well enough.”

  I shook my head ruefully. “I would rather not have the fence in my life at all, but I am afraid it is too late for that. But now, on this side of the fence, I have need of Mother Iron.”

  He paused awhile, as if thinking through his next words. Erio was a ghost a thousand years older than the Factor, I was sure, but the Factor had lived centuries longer than any man might expect, which lent him an unusual substance in the afterlife. How that experience bore upon his thoughts, I could not say. It must have granted him an involuntary wisdom at the least.

  Finally, the Factor spoke. “I will not bandy with you about Mother Iron. She is much older than even the farthest extent of my knowledge.”

  “I do not believe she is so much more ancient than the sorcerer-engineers.”

  “Tinkering fools,” he said dismissively. “Boys toying with brass and wire. Mother Iron is something else. Older. Deeper.”

  “I have seen you in her company.”

  “Yes…”

  “I would speak with her.”

  “She does not respond when bidden.”

  “Unlike ghosts?” I asked, my voice nasty. “I never believe what people say. Not when they act the opposite. You can find her. Bring her to me.”

  “Even for me, it does not work that way.” Something of a smile played across his face. “My powers are far more limited than you seem willing to credit.”