Kalimpura (Green Universe)

by Jay Lake

  The mercury pond rippled as I passed it. I glanced down only to falter in my pace as I saw for the first time ever a vision there. Flames heaved in a burning sea, and eyeless children cried out as their blank faces beseeched me. My gut lurched in a momentary twist of terror and I ran deeper into the darkness.

  What the liquid mirror had shown was too close to my dreams of late for my comfort. I growled a curse under my breath, damning this god back to the titanics who had birthed us all.

  Blackblood was mocking me.

  Passing through the tripled doorway into the darkness beyond, I came upon a familiar carved screen. It was barely visible, illuminated by the flickering light of a single tallow candle. The throne above and behind the screen stood vacant. The shackles at its arms and pediment lay empty, useless, containing nothing but a slice of deeper shadow. The languid young man I’d seen there before was absent. Who knew what purposes a god was about? Whether being “here” was a concept that held any significance in the face of divine ennui?

  “I am arrived,” I told the darkness in my best speaking-to-gods voice. That, I had found, was rather like facing down a large and irritated dog. The divine responded best to a firm intent and despised any appearance of weakness. “I present myself to make my farewells.”

  Only the faint whisper of dust falling answered me. I listened for the creak and pop of Skinless, or the footsteps of a languid god returned from whatever space they inhabited.

  Nothing. The temple might as well have been a sepulcher.

  “I honor what you have done in my life.” Deep breath. “I honor your lost priest Septio.” Another deep breath. “I honor you and what you do.” One last shudder. “But I am leaving Copper Downs. I do not know when or if I shall return.”

  The necessary words spoken, I turned to find a man so close behind me that he could have encircled my shoulders with his arms. My short knives were in my hands and touching his abdomen between one moment and the next.

  “It would be amusing to see you try,” said Blackblood.

  He did not breathe, of course, except when taking in air to speak. I had not heard him behind me, because he had not willed it. Still, one must keep up a good face. “There are worse temperings for my steel than the blood of a god.”

  When the god’s smile dawned, I was sorry for my little joke. An acrid scent bit at my nose. I realized my hands were growing quite warm. I looked down to see both my knife blades glowing a dull orange. With a shriek, I dropped them.

  “Temper, temper,” said Blackblood. He bent and grasped each by the heated blade. The stench of burned flesh filled the air.

  Despite myself, I gasped.

  “What is pain to me?” With that, the god handed me my knives once more.

  I held the weapons away from my body, wary of the fading heat even through the leather-wrapped handles. “Your purposes are ever mysterious.”

  “They should not be.” He shrugged, so human a gesture, then in one step was upon his throne. I cannot describe how he covered the distance of a rod, or spun me about doing it. He just … did.

  The manacles there stirred to fasten themselves around his wrists and ankles. With another sly, dangerous smile, Blackblood said, “It makes my priests feel better to see me bound.”

  Curiosity overcame my more difficult emotions. “What could men forge that would hold you?”

  “Nothing. But even metalworkers have gods.”

  That I could well imagine. Smithing had to be one of the oldest magics of all. Metal drawn from deep within the earth carried the might of the deep darknesses and the secrecy of stone with it.

  “I thank you for the lesson.” My gut still churned, spinning like a child’s toy. Apparently this day was meant for queasy, no matter what I did.

  Blackblood’s eyes flashed. The hair on my arms and neck rose like wires. “Where is my boy-child?” His voice had lost its human timbre and become something much more like what I’d heard from Desire, or the Lily Goddess. Weighty with the power of years and the might of the divine. A blunt instrument for persuasion and intimidation.

  Holding in my bladder fiercely tight, I stared him down. “I do not recall you carrying a baby under your heart these past nine months.”

  The god leaned forward. Pale light flickered across his fingertips and along his chains. I realized he was nude, and his penis seemed enormous. Growing, even. A sword hardening in his irritation. “Neither do I recall you fathering a son on your own body, like some miraculous temple virgin.” The dancing light reached his eyes and took up a place there like lightning from a distant storm at sea. “I have spoken for the child … Federo.”

  With that, he paused and laughed. Dust and small grains of rock rained down upon me from above. The floor quivered beneath my feet as my nose filled with the scent of ash and burnt flesh.

  “You have named your boy so?” The god seemed torn between amusement and rage.

  It finally dawned upon me that I was in real danger here. Would he let me go? I had captured Blackblood’s attention in a more profound and frightening way than any of our previous encounters. His chains caught my eye again. Blood and tempering indeed.

  I pushed past the screen to approach the throne upon its dais of black rock. His swelling cock dangled at my eye level, but I ignored it. The god’s hands were out of reach, but his feet were before me. He was large, larger than human now, but still held that form.

  “My child is mine to name and raise as I see fit,” I announced. “You do not hold a prior claim. And he is not yours to take up.”

  “You cost me a worthy boy-priest.” Blackblood’s voice boomed loud enough to hurt my ears. “He would have been my Pater Primus someday. You owe me.”

  “No.” I stood firm as I could. “I owe you nothing.” I brought the knives up, still too warm for comfort, spreading my arms to drive them swiftly through a link in each chain upon his feet. From there I pushed the tips into the hollow spot of skin just before the great tendon at the back of each ankle.

  The god was pinned to his own chains by blades tempered in his own heat and, perhaps, blood. There was very little else on the plate of the world that would possibly hold him back, but his remark about the gods of metalworkers had made me think that blades so treated might serve.

  He gasped, not so much from pain as amazement, or so I thought. As he himself had said, what was pain to a pain god?

  “Listen,” I told him, my voice a hissing growl. I felt very large in that moment, as if I were greater than myself. “We made no bargain over this. And you cannot simply take my children from me. Your power does not cover me over. But I will make a bargain with you now.”

  “What would that bargain be?” Blackblood’s voice was flat and sharp as a murderer’s razor. I also noted he had not moved his feet from where I had pinned them.

  “I will not leave my blades in your chains if you will release whatever claims you think to have over me.”

  “Do you believe it that simple?” Bemusement now.

  “Never so simple,” I answered honestly. “But I bargain with the chips in my hand. I will leave this city, I will take my children with me, and I would have honor between us at our parting.”

  Blackblood gave me a long, careful stare. The fires in his eyes died down, and he seemed to shrink a bit. He waved a hand. Some bit of his languor had returned. “Go,” he said. “Your son will come to me in his own time someday. What are years to me? Like pain, they pass unnoticed.”

  “What are the years through which you slept?” I asked, challenging him. It was I, after all, who had slain the Duke and released the gods of this city from four centuries of enforced silence.

  He did not like that so much. But still his hands twitched, and my knives fell away from his feet. “Take your audacity and go, Green. The tempered blades are my gift to you. May they protect your son until he has need of me.”

  “May my son never have need of you at all.” I bowed and turned away. Skinless stood in deeper shadow, his glistening fat
and slick muscle gleaming slightly. I nodded to the avatar before striding back out into the sanctuary.

  Still no one was there, though I met the new Pater Primus hovering anxiously at the top of the steps outside the bent metal doors.

  “What did you do to him?” he asked. His hands slipped across each other’s wrists like birds fighting. This man knew whose deeds had brought him his accession to his current precarious position of power.

  I took pity on him. “Nothing. We spoke awhile, and made a bargain.”

  “The ground shook beneath my feet.”

  Looking around, I saw no toppled walls or panicked horses. “These things happen. At least when you are very lucky.” I tapped his chin with the tip of one blade, still warm and bloody from the god, and wondered what else this day could possibly bring.

  * * *

  I had other people to see, and passage to buy on a ship, but the morning was fine. A sense of freedom overcame me. Something in the air beckoned—the breeze, the temperature, the angle of the sun; I would not have been able to say precisely what. I could taste potential.

  With a purposeful stride, I headed for the Dockmarket. I did not need to buy anything. For that matter, I had brought no money with me. A crowded place full of choices appealed nonetheless.

  What I had been struggling against in those days was a sense of commitment. Choices made that neither could nor would be revoked. I was a mother now. My children needed me. That meant I could not take ship upon ship to sail until the seas were a different color and people spoke no language I had ever heard. Nor could I settle into a life as merchant or midwife or tavernkeeper. Not that I exactly wanted to do those things, but I found myself missing a sense of opportunity that I’d never really understood I had felt in the first place.

  I knew I would always be a mother. I would always be too close to the gods. I would always be a woman who could kill with a casual hand and counted more ghosts behind her than most people counted friends in their life.

  I would always be who I was.

  My steps slowed at those thoughts. My heart grew heavier. Was this what it meant to be in the world? Was this how Ilona felt?

  Looking about, I realized I was not heading for the Dockmarket, but for the lazaret on Bustle Street. Perhaps that was fair enough. Mother Vajpai had likely returned there after the Naming. Mother Argai would be back by now. Laris, former priestess of Marya and now priestess of Mother Iron, was often at the lazaret as well.

  And women, a bit like I’d known in the Temple of the Silver Lily back in Kalimpura. Mother Vajpai was training up a cadre of Blades here. Given only a few short months thus far, they were laughable by the standards we held in Selistan, but this was a city where women never fought. Or more to the point, never fought back.

  At least, women other than myself.

  Small wonder the Interim Council had not known what to make of me. Despite my mood, my lips quirked into a smile I could not contain. Surely Jeschonek and his fellow councilors would be pleased to see the last of me. In my place, I would leave them an entire nest of women growing into their own power.

  * * *

  By the time I reached the lazaret, my deepening mood had lifted once more. The building itself was an old stronghouse or counting room set in a merchant quarter very much in decline. The architecture hailed from an era when handling money was a high-risk occupation with many pointed contenders. That is to say, the lazaret presented a strong, blank façade with slightly outsloped walls and narrow windows on the two upper floors for archers to shoot down into the street. Granite blocks formed the lower courses, with close-set brick above. The door was recessed to limit access, banded and armored against battering.

  Nothing more valuable than the safety of women was stored there today, but that was temptation enough. From time to time, some angry father or husband with a handful of hired bravos would arrive, intent on forcing the door to drag home a bruised and weeping girl-child to her marriage bed. They were never admitted. Mothers anxious for the fate of potential grandchildren might be, if they came alone and soft-spoken.

  Within, women looked to themselves and each other. Though I had not been there in almost three months, I knew that Mother Vajpai and Mother Argai had infected the inhabitants of the lazaret with ideas of strength and self-sufficiency. Not to mention more than a few techniques. From the acolytes at the Temple of Endurance I’d heard a rumor that two large girls had been apprenticed to an unusually cooperative swordsmith—that would be a first in the modern history of Copper Downs.

  Like everyone else, I tugged the bellpull by the door. A minute or two later—quite a long time to stand in the street waiting—someone within flicked open one of the spyholes. I heard a squeal; then the door opened with a swift creak.

  It was Laris, priestess of Mother Iron, who greeted me. She beamed her joy. I’d rescued her from the rubble of Marya’s temple last winter, though I had been unable to save her sister Solis, already crushed to death in the attack on their goddess by the priests Iso and Osi, agents of the Saffron Tower.

  “Green! Come in, come in. We’re about to sit down to some roast pigeon, and Failla has brought us some fine white bread from one of the bakeries near the Ivory Quarter.”

  Indeed, the warm, rich smell of crisping fat greeted me from within. Potatoes, too, I thought, and someone had found a bit of wild marjoram with which to spice them. “You should have told me before,” I said, laughing. “I’d have come to see to the cooking.”

  The most usual fare at the lazaret was the soup pot, which never truly emptied. A woman could always get a bowl and a sympathetic ear from old Neela, who tended it almost ceaselessly. Though the soup might taste strange, and sometimes went down poorly, it was ever warm and filling. If the women of the lazaret had made a dinner to sit down to, they were celebrating.

  She replied with a smile, “In a house of women you may be sure there are more cooks than any broth needs.”

  “Of course there are.” I doubted any of them had my training. If there was one thing I was good at besides killing people, it was cooking for them. And a cook generally received more compliments on her work than an assassin. “Still, let us go to the kitchen.”

  They had, thank the Lily Goddess, not put Neela at the pigeons. That woman could stretch a stone and three onions into supper for a score of diners, but I was unsure if she knew butter from batter in a proper kitchen. Instead, I found a pair of women who were unfamiliar to me basting a tray of birds with something oily and fragrant. There was my wild marjoram. A great bowl of roasted potatoes steamed still in their jackets. Someone had left off chopping cabbage, so rather than interfere before the hot fire, I took up a knife and put my weapons skills to more peaceable uses.

  Kitchens have a simple secret: It is a profound comfort to prepare food. Sharing a meal is a sacrament of human existence. In all my readings and travels, I have never heard of a place where people of goodwill would not sit down together over bread and salt, at the very least. Even so mundane a task as chopping cabbage, throwing away the wormy or moldering bits—this stuff seemed to have been salvaged from a feed bin—made me a part of the community of women. In my experience, few men cooked, and fewer men understood the magic inherent in a fire, a pot, and a spoon.

  Too bad for them.

  I spoke their language, too, when needed: hilt and blade.

  Once I had the cabbage chopped down, I swept the mound into a great pottery bowl rather ineptly decorated with blue rabbits and looked to my seasonings. I combined a draggled onion swiftly diced, a quick whip of several egg whites and bit of precious olive oil, a sprinkle of salt, and regret that the lazaret could not afford peppercorns.

  When I finally looked up again, the pigeons were gone, the potatoes were on their way out, and only Laris remained, still smiling. “You seemed so peaceful,” she said. “And thank you for not interrupting Sion and Marchess at their work.”

  “I do not—,” I began hotly, then stopped. Of course I did. I almost always knew
better, and it was so hard to get people to listen. “Never mind,” I added in a smaller voice.

  Laris grabbed the slaw I’d made. “I’ll carry the bowl.”

  I followed her into the courtyard. I’d been there only once before—the lazaret had never been a haunt of mine. Four tables had been set, and almost two dozen women were gathered, chatting noisily. Laris set the bowl down next to a metal tray of golden, steaming pigeon carcasses, then called for attention in a clear, penetrating voice much different from her usual soft tones.

  “Sisters! Sisters.”

  Spotting Mother Vajpai’s dark face among all the pale Petraean women, I sidled over to her. Where is Mother Argai?

  Into the silence she had gathered around herself, Laris began to pray. Matter-of-factly, as if talking to us rather than leading us, but unmistakably prayer. One did not so much believe in gods, after all, as acknowledge them.

  “We thank Mother Iron for this hour of peaceful assembly, and the food which graces our table. We thank her for protecting this lazaret, and providing us with our sisters from across the Storm Sea who have offered so much guidance and lavished such care upon our number. We ask her protection for those soon to depart from our shores, and offer our bodies, our minds, and our spirits to her for sacrifice as she sees fit.” Laris brushed a finger from her groin, across her left breast, to end touching her forehead.

  I had not seen this gesture before. Most of the women followed it smoothly, though Mother Vajpai did not. The meaning seemed clear enough to me. I was pleased that ritual was settling in around Mother Iron. The transition from the goddess Marya’s death to Mother Iron’s ascension in her place had not been kind to the women of Copper Downs.

  Then we sat, while the two cooks passed the food into shallow bowls to share out. The fine bread sat piled on a silver platter that looked to have come from one of the great houses of the Velviere District or the Ivory Quarter, though I could not know whether that had been donation, salvage, or theft. A torn-off chunk came my way. I used it to sop at the pigeon gravy that kept my meat and potatoes warm and savory.