Kalimpura (Green Universe)

by Jay Lake

  “Are you from the east?” I let a bit of a Bhopuri accent slip into my Seliu. In Kalimpura, this would have marked me as a hick, but I’d picked up a sufficient handful of regional accents to make a pretense when needed. Sometimes being a hick was useful. People tended to ignore you, for example.

  As, I suspected, people ignored Ghuji.

  He looked up at me and smiled grimly. “A village in the Sister of Morning Mountains.”

  That would be the northeast coast of Bhopura. I’d never been there, though I’d glimpsed the peaks from aboard ship when passing Cape Purna.

  “A long way from there to here,” I said, though his part of Selistan was physically closest to the Stone Coast.

  “Longer when there is no path home. My village was burned.”

  I waited to see if he would say more, or perhaps wanted me to ask, but Ghuji’s gaunt smile faded. Now he held my eye.

  “What can I do for you here and now?” I asked, taking care with my words. His reason for speaking to me was less clear.

  “The man Paavati was telling you of?”

  “Yes…” Well, at least we were on topic.

  “When you saw him, his face was covered with leather.”

  A statement, not a question. Interesting. “Yes. I could see only his eyes.”

  “Men like him burned my village. Everyone was being slain. Even the chickens and goats.” He paused for a deep, shuddering breath. “They spared me only because they did not realize I had been working down inside our well, repairing the brick courses. I was staying in shadow for hours until the screaming had long stopped and the crackle of flame had died. When I climbed out, I saw them rooting through the ashes of our little temple.”

  I was both fascinated and appalled. “For what?”

  He shrugged. “Our small portion of silver? Our idols? I do not know.” Then he leaned close and said something that would stay with me a very long time. “But these men, they are in Kalimpura as well. From there, I think. The beggars know them as the Quiet Men. When their faces are uncovered, they pass as do you and I. When their faces are covered, they kill.”

  Like Blades, but with far less discretion. I had never heard of this sect or order. Oh, would Mother Vajpai want to know of this.

  Assuming she did not already.

  I took a stab at the circumstances here in Copper Downs. “This Quiet Man sheltered in the Red House on Montane Street?” The Red House was what the Reformed Council’s quarters were called around town, in a fit of particularly poverty-stricken imagination.

  Another shrug. “I do not know. But he has not been among us here since the Prince of the City departed.”

  I pushed the steaming bowl of dhal in front of him. My purse was empty, I had no money to pay this Ghuji, but I could feed him. The Tavernkeep and I had our own understandings.

  “My thanks,” I said. “But please, a question: Why are you telling me of this now?”

  A third and clearly final shrug. “No one will act against the Quiet Men. No one will admit they exist. But you slew one of them. Perhaps knowing what I could tell you will help you slay more.”

  “He died in a fire that he himself had set,” I told Ghuji on impulse. “I made certain of it.”

  Something flickered in the man’s eyes as his shoulders sagged. “Be careful,” he said, then turned away, though not without taking his bowl of dhal with him.

  I watched him thoughtfully a few moments before releasing my attention. There was a red house to visit on Montane Street. One last time I turned to the Tavernkeep. “It has been a pleasure to know you.”

  “May your soulpath be broad and rich.”

  “And yours.”

  With those words between us, I left, headed for the neighborhood of the old Ducal Palace.

  * * *

  Though it was still yet morning, I was already exhausted. I also buzzed with excitement. After spending months being pregnant, and even just a week tending to my babies, it was good to be out in the world. With a purpose, at that.

  I did not propose to take on a building full of guards. The Reformed Council had Lampet’s lads, the Conciliar Guard regiment raised by the councilor I trusted least out of any of that lot. The only reason Lampet was not running the city right now was that he had another plan. That, and I had forsworn politics in this place.

  It did occur to me that setting fire to the building might be a solution to my problems. A bit messy, but it would smoke out any more Quiet Men or other agents of Surali’s who might be lurking there.

  Though I had to admit, the clerks and maids and guards who doubtless filled the place were not at fault. Somehow, it didn’t seem right to kill them just to get at Lampet and one or two men he might still be sheltering.

  I snorted. Motherhood was making me soft.

  Lampet had sought harm to my children. I had no doubt it was he who had struck whatever deal with Surali. Anyone who worked to support the councilor was part of the problem. The clerks and maids could go hang if they couldn’t see what it was they served.

  Still, that did not mean they deserved to die.

  By the time I reached Montane Street, I had talked myself out of killing everyone in the place by fire. The next most likely plan seemed to be to broach the front door. That had obvious drawbacks, starting with overenthusiastic or underinformed guards.

  Finally I slipped into an alley to look over the back of the Red House. I didn’t want to be seen approaching, so I started several blocks up, mugging an innocent clothesline inside someone’s courtyard for a shapeless gray cloak to cover my leathers.

  No point in announcing myself prematurely if I was not going straight into the visitors’ entrance.

  * * *

  Back in my days of training within the Pomegranate Court, I’d spend quite a bit of time reviewing architecture with Mistress Celine. This was for several reasons, not the least of which was that I was expected to become a mistress of a great house, and a wise mistress knew exactly how everything in her domain worked. Chatelaines and majordomos were all to the good, but a family or household could be robbed into penury without proper oversight.

  So I was quite familiar with kitchen deliveries, laundry entrances, gardening sheds, carriage houses, even smithies and carpentry shops, as ways in and out of stately homes whose owners thought only of the forecourt, or possibly the mudroom through which one visited one’s dogs and horses.

  A laundry never truly closed down, not in a large enough place, and certainly the kitchen did not either. Someone had to bake the breads overnight, and keep the stockpots bubbling and the spits turning.

  I watched from inside a quiet set of horse stalls across the alley. A neighbor’s back extents, unmonitored at the moment in the apparently long-term absence of horses. Having no great affection for those beasts myself, I could understand why even the wealthy might forgo them.

  The Red House had active stables. Grooms raced about polishing a high-wheeled carriage to an especially wicked shade of black. I’d have bet a gold obol the interior was red velvet, and that the conveyance was for Councilor Lampet’s particular use.

  Likewise the kitchen, where in the space of thirty minutes, three different carters made deliveries, along with a dairyman with some particularly difficult wheels of cheese.

  Other servants were about as well. These were not the temporary, loyalless hirelings such as Surali had populating her rented mansion during the recent unpleasantness. No, I knew this type. The senior staff would be very proud and jealous of their positions. The understaff would watch one another for any slight or error that might make the difference in advancement. I could kill, or possibly even bluff, my way in, but I could not walk among them as if I were another servant without the alarm being raised.

  However, I could arrive on a cart.…

  I retreated up the alley to await the next worthwhile delivery.

  * * *

  Less than an hour later, I returned to the back of the Red House clucking at a pair of mules who drew a ca
rt loaded with cabbages and root vegetables.

  “You ain’t Marsby,” said a redheaded boy in a clean but threadbare tunic who came out to meet me. He sounded cheerful about that.

  “Marsby’s been took sick.” If by sick I meant “tied up in a wood box with his own stockings in his mouth,” that was even a true statement.

  I hadn’t hurt him.

  Not much.

  “You’re foreign,” the boy announced. As if this were a notable discovery.

  “I’ve noticed that, yes.” I jumped down off the driver’s bench and patted one mule on the flank. Like horses, but slower and meaner, I understood them to be. So far they had not argued and had played their part. But then, I figured the mules knew their way with or without me.

  The boy fed each of them half an apple as I dropped the gate on the cart and tugged out a crate of rutabagas. “I don’t know where to take this,” I told him.

  He grudgingly took hold of a crate of cabbages. “Marsby carries ’em two at a time.”

  “I ain’t Marsby.” I was beginning to wonder how often this lad received a good kicking, and if he knew how richly he deserved such treatment. Now that I was here, I wanted to be inside and about my business before someone of wit noticed me.

  The idiot boy led me up three steps to a stone porch, and into the pantry beyond. I set my crate on a table, where an exasperated woman was counting out an inventory of herbs. She glared at me, then went back to her work.

  Outside, my little friend had grabbed another crate of cabbage, but stopped to whisper to the mules. That was fine with me. I pushed around him with a crate of potatoes, walked right past the herb counter, and strode into the kitchen.

  Such a place. In other circumstances, I would have liked to cook there. A central fire with a massive spit fit for a whole game carcass. Three bread ovens, each with their own firebox. An oil stove and a woodstove. A huge butchering counter. A cold room, judging by one overbuilt door. Copper pans hanging above like the rain falling from an explosion in an armory.

  Cook’s boys and assistants pushed everywhere, through steam and smoke and the smell of some fish meeting its end in a fry of olive oil, lemons, and capers. I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, then shoved my crate into the hands of a passing scullery maid. “Here, these are in the wrong place,” I said in my best, and very genuine, quality-accented Petraean.

  Contrasting with my dark skin, I knew it confused her, but that was the point. Confusion and continued motion: those were my weapons right now.

  And being here, I was glad I had not simply blocked the doors and fired the house.

  With that thought, I grabbed up a jelly pan and strode confidently toward the doors that led into the main house.

  A hand grasped at me. Someone nearly had their wrist broken for their trouble, but I stifled the impulse and turned.

  This was Cook. Not a cook, or even the cook. Just Cook. The tyrant of the kitchen, and in a great house, the only servant over whom the chatelaine or majordomo had no real power. She was red-faced with stringy hair and piercing gray eyes. Unlike most cooks, she was also quite thin. Her dress was dark blue in a cut a respectable grocer’s wife might have worn. This in contrast to the simple striped smocks of the maids and undercooks. I noted the skin of her fingers was peeling. She shook slightly as she grasped me.

  “You do not belong.”

  “No.” I tried for honesty first. More persuasive methods were still readily available, and I was close to the door, in any case. “I am here on urgent purpose for the councilor, and preferred not to be announced through the front.”

  Her eyes narrowed, but she did not immediately reject my explanation. I was right in guessing that Lampet was the sort to have skulks and sneaks coming in at all hours. “Don’t your sort usually present themselves to Master Roberti at the little gate?”

  “I don’t know any Master Roberti,” I replied. “I report elsewhere.”

  Cook’s glare did not change. “There is no Master Roberti. Good that you did not lie. Go on, then, but give me back my jelly pan.”

  I handed it to her, pulled up the hood on my stolen robe, and slipped into the hallway beyond. Just as well I had not fought in the kitchen. The world needed more cooks and fewer assassins.

  * * *

  Beyond was a reasonably conventional layout. The Red House was a turreted folly of the sort popular in the last century of the Duke’s reign, and so did not have the sweeping, pillared front hall of so many older homes and buildings of its class. Rather, a long, full-height corridor joined the back to the front with staircases rising from each side to internal balconies on the second and third storey. There would be a ballroom nearby, a parlor, and a formal dining room. Bedrooms upstairs, with possibly another set of parlors and studios on the second floor.

  All of it offices now, of course. Though this hall was empty of clerks and their files—nothing like the chaos at the Textile Bourse, where the Interim Council carried on the messy business of the city.

  Realizing that I did not see bureaucrats at their work here, I understood that the Reformed Council wanted to rule, but were not so much interested in governing. While I could sympathize with that view as a matter of principle, as a practical matter, it seemed a terrible way to run a city.

  Lampet would be up there, I was certain of it. He wasn’t the sort to have an easily accessible office on the ground floor. One would have to walk a distance through halls to reach him. Then wait a while.

  Lacking my misappropriated jelly pan, I swept a Hanchu vase of dried roses thin and crackling as paper off a delicate Siengurae period side table and trotted up the nearest stairs. One of the best ways to be invisible in a busy place was to carry something and look certain of yourself. The people upstairs would not be jealous of their positions, and so to them a servant was just mobile furniture. All the better for remaining unnoticed.

  So long as I didn’t run into any senior maids up there.

  * * *

  I walked at a servant’s pace—swift without hurrying—past the stairs toward the far end of the hall on the second storey. It seemed wiser to scout all the doors before I started opening them and blundering into people. At the corresponding T-intersection on the east end of the house, I turned and saw two of Lampet’s lads in their Conciliar Guard uniforms. Big lumps, as they all seemed to be.

  He was the kind of leader who distrusted intelligence in his underlings. I could work with that.

  “Fresh flowers for m’lord,” I muttered as I approached the door with my chin tucked down. Fresh my ass—these were dry as Mother Iron’s twat, but you work with what you have.

  One of the guards huffed elaborately, then deigned to open the door.

  I whispered a shy thank-you and stepped through.

  * * *

  Lampet’s office had been a solarium once. Angled glass formed much of the ceiling and outer wall, while light flooded across the green and white tiled floor. Unlike the rest of the house, which was paneled in classically dark wood, this room had been finished in something blond and very fine-grained. A set of green leather wingback chairs was drawn up by a fireplace that had obviously seen much use in the recent winter. A large, very clean desk stood under the window, a bar nearby displaying a generous selection of wines and liquors.

  Councilor Lampet sat behind it dressed as if for a court appearance and picking at his fingernails with a letter opener—no, I realized, a stiletto much like the one the Quiet Man had tried to use against me. A killer’s weapon rather than the broad, honest blades of a fighter such as I carried. This man had always struck me as resembling a ferret. The stiletto was his fangs. Beyond that, Lampet’s pale, perfectly oiled hair and pointed face did nothing to dispel that impression.

  I shuffled toward the fireplace to put down my flowers on one of the side tables by the chairs there. As I leaned forward, Lampet spoke.

  “I hardly expected you to come here, young lady.”

  His voice held all the vicious oiliness I’d come to assoc
iate with the man. He knew; he’d probably known since I’d arrived with Marsby’s cart. No one in the house had tipped me. They all did serve this man, body and soul.

  I should have set fire in the first place and the maids be damned. For Cook, I would reserve a special place on her own roasting spit as the flames raced through her kitchen.

  There was nothing for it but to face him with whatever momentum I had left. That was my fighting style, after all—to just keep hitting until everyone was down.

  So I turned, palming my short knives. He wouldn’t be fooled for more than a second or two, but the long knife in its thigh scabbard was too much in this moment. “I come and go where I please,” I told him, striding toward the desk.

  To my right, the door clicked open. The two guards stepped in. When I glanced at them, they now seemed quite a bit more intelligent and alert than they had out in the hallway.

  “You will stop where you are,” Lampet said mildly.

  I hadn’t gotten this far in life by listening to scum like him, so I stepped right up to the edge of the desk. “Or wh—?”

  My question was interrupted by a meaty hand on my shoulder. I twisted away from the grip only to run into a swinging fist with my left temple.

  At least it didn’t hold a blade, I thought as I staggered backwards. One of my short knives rattled on the floor until a booted foot stamped down on it. The guard with his hand now on my right arm twisted it back until my shoulder and elbow began to pop.

  He was about to dislocate my joints. Then I would be under his control, nearly incapacitated by pain and dead at Lampet’s next whim.

  Short knife fully in my own fist, I turned with the twist, allowing my arm to be torn from its socket in return for putting a blade in the big man’s neck from an unexpected direction. It slid in like he was made of butter. I didn’t bother to swallow my scream of unnerving pain as blood sprayed in a fountaining jet from the slashed artery. He convulsed, releasing my arm, which hung useless now.

  I was already moving, spinning rapidly into the other goon who was drawing a sword of his own. In that moment, I knew I would win, because only a fool brings a sword to a knife fight. We were too damned close for the reach of his blade.