by Jay Lake
There was nothing particularly convincing about us. Mother Vajpai especially would never pass a second glance as a scullion, but with luck we would not draw the first glance. So long as we didn’t move like Blades.
“Go now,” urged Sister Shatta. “We shall be dull-witted serving wenches should anyone come asking.”
I turned to Mother Surekha. “And you?”
She glowered but held her harder words in check. “Once you leave, my duty has been discharged.”
“Keep it discharged,” I advised her. “There will be grief raining down aplenty soon enough. You will not want that.”
“I saw you cut those men,” she whispered.
My index finger tapped her chest as regret panged me. “You would have killed them, too.”
“Not so easily. No one should die that easy.” With those words, she turned abruptly and pushed through the crowd of onlookers.
Raising my voice, I said, “Thank you all. There are no promises I can make, but if I can manage, things will be different soon.”
“Come back and cook awhile,” someone said—I did not catch the voice.
“We will.” With that, I headed for the pantry and the loading doors beyond where the draymen brought food from the various markets around Kalimpura. Mother Vajpai ghosted close to my elbow. I could practically hear her being thoughtful.
* * *
For all the imposing glory of the frontage of the Temple of the Silver Lily, the rear facing was as anonymously crowded and busy as the back of any other substantial institution. Carters, beggars, small tradesmen—a steady traffic passed in the alley behind. We slipped into the stream, walking briskly with our heads turned down. Most of the servants in this city or any other walked briskly. A shuffling step would have cried out that we wished not to be recognized.
Swiftly we merged into the crowded streets beyond, losing ourselves away from the Blood Fountain with its swarm of angry Street Guildsmen. After about six blocks, I pulled the limping Mother Vajpai into someone’s walled garden to rest a short while beneath the shade of a papaya tree. It was a shame about the latch on their gate, which I was forced to cut through with the god-blooded dagger.
“Those Street Guild bastards did not used to have so much power,” I said, pacing before the bench whether Mother Vajpai unashamedly took her rest.
“Things have changed since you left.”
We’d discussed this back in Copper Downs, we’d discussed this aboard Prince Enero, we would doubtless continue to discuss this, but still I was surprised. The Blades had always seemed to me to be so powerful, so constant, so … confident.
“Things have changed,” I agreed. “That does not mean I must accept what they have become. But now I need to get back to my children.” My breasts were not aching yet—we had left the ship scarcely two hours ago—but they would before the day grew much older. And besides, though I understood quite starkly why we had not taken the children with us on disembarking, still I feared for their safety. So long as the officers and crew of Prince Enero were more afraid of me than they were afraid of whoever challenged them from over the rail, things would remain stable.
But not any longer than that.
“We cannot return to the waterfront,” Mother Vajpai pointed out. “Certainly not right now. The Street Guild will be there in numbers. And they are very stirred up.”
“Without the help of other Blades, you and I would be ill advised to try that,” I said, agreeing. Puffing air from my cheeks in a measured sigh, I tried to think what the next most likely course of action would be.
The problem with being a Blade is that you were a Blade. We formed no alliances to speak of, and neither gave nor asked the help of others. Our work was our own, and we alone suffered whatever consequences arose from that in turn.
So we had no allied Court or Guild to turn to. No other temple or god kept such a force to hand, for the Blades’ long-held monopoly on the Death Right had always discouraged such adventurism. And our hoped-for allies in the Saffron Tower renegades Firesetter and Fantail were still far from our grasp.
“Who do you know that we could appeal to?” I finally asked.
“The same people you do.” I heard a twist of amusement in Mother Vajpai’s voice. She was playing the part of a teacher once more.
You know the answer, now think of it. At least the lessons here were not beaten into me as they had been back at the Pomegranate Court within the Factor’s bluestone walls.
No, the lessons here carried their own life or death penalties.
“Everyone is armed, and no one is, in this city.” We’d certainly done our part to discourage overtly competing forces, though obviously the temple and the Blades had failed quite badly in containing the growth of the Street Guild. “It is difficult to know where to turn.”
“Some people are everywhere and nowhere,” Mother Vajpai replied in a mild tone.
“Everywhere and nowhere…”
“You’ve been doing very well so far.” She smiled at me, though her face was a bit drawn. “I am impressed.”
“You were with me through much of Surali’s mess in Copper Downs,” I protested. Meaning, of course, Weren’t you impressed with me then?
“That was Copper Downs. This is Kalimpura.” She seemed to be stating a basic fact of existence, some immutable law of life. I was once again reminded of how much the foreigner I was here, for all my dark skin and command of the language.
“And in this city we have all manner of people everywhere. Vendors, children both free and enslaved, servants, bondsmen, beggars—” I broke off, thinking about that. Then: “You and Mother Meiko knew me before I arrived at the temple all those years ago.”
Her smile broadened, bringing some relief to the pain on her face. “Of course we did.”
“Because you’d paid the beggar boys to follow me.” Another piece fell into place. “In fact, I rather imagine even Little Kareen had reported me to you.” The beggar-chief had sheltered me awhile on my initial arrival in Kalimpura before deciding I was too violent for his gang of ruffians.
“We cannot learn everything from Blades and their runs. There is too much life in Kalimpura, too many walls behind which secrets dwell.”
“Little Kareen…” I mused on the man. He’d seemed so fat and old to me when I met him, but I was a child then. Now, at sixteen years of age, my perspective had changed—or so I thought at the time, though memory of that moment’s careless thought can still make me laugh at my younger self. I would have been so offended at that amusement.
He could not have been more than his early twenties, I realized. Not an old man, barely a young man. Just a bit older than a frightened, lost girl with the burden of killing close to her heart and mind. My dead bandit briefly loomed in memory before I dismissed his shade.
“Beggars move everywhere and are little noticed. We place too much confidence in caste in this city.” She tapped her lips. “Though in fairness it is easier to move down than up, unless the people you want to fool are also down-caste. They are the hardest to deceive.”
“We don’t want to fool the beggars. We want to enlist them.” I began to grow excited. Now I knew the path back to my children. “We need their help in fooling the Street Guild.”
“Let us go find our beggar-king,” Mother Vajpai said. “I am rested.”
We harvested some fruits for our baskets from the garden of our unwitting hosts, then headed through the winding streets of Kalimpura for the Landward Gate, outside of which the bully-master kept his little kingdom, the better to harass the peasants and travelers come to the city from all over Selistan.
* * *
The crowd beyond the walls was not so great as I remembered it from my initial arrival here. But then the rice harvest was not yet in, so the farmers and their families knee-deep in the muddy fields of the surrounding countryside were a month from either selling to brokers or making the long trek themselves.
This subtracted only a portion of the traffic, though. O
ther fruits and vegetables were in season; there was a constant trade in animals, slaves, and children—my vision darkened at the sight of a coffle of five- and six-year olds, but this was not the fight I had today. Later, later, I promised myself, who had been seeking vengeance and an end to that custom since I was old enough to understand how I myself had been sold away.
That life did bring me a later for this is one of the profound blessings of the years that have passed since those days.
All those, and travelers of other sorts. Bandits come to pawn their thefts, pilgrims made destitute by vow or at sword’s point. A few messengers on horseback or mule, though riding animals were not so common outside the city walls. Traveling mummers, fortune-seekers, confidence tricksters, all of them falling somewhere between the categories of predator and prey here beyond the walls where food sellers, guides, beggars, and the ubiquitous “agents” roamed indisputably in their own class.
I reckoned I still knew where Little Kareen’s camp was, what he’d called his patch on a prime piece of land alongside a creek near enough the Landward Gate for convenience, but far enough from the road for at least a pretense of privacy.
Being out here brought forth another set of memories, different from that flood sparked by the kitchens. I turned to Mother Vajpai. “When I met Mother Meiko on the road, I took her for a pilgrim. Yet I have never since heard of our Goddess expecting pilgrimage. Where are the holy sites she had gone to visit? Why?”
Mother Vajpai’s pace slowed, and she stared at me awhile. “You did not see it then, did you?”
“See what? I was just a girl, frightened and running.”
“Her pilgrimage was to find you.” A hand raised to forestall the dozen questions already springing to my lips. “Of course, we did not know your name. Barely suspected your appearance. But such, well, power … coming to Selistan from over the sea did not go unnoticed. What you had done, back in Copper Downs. It marked you.”
Mother Vajpai was one of the few outside the original conspiracy who was privy to that whole tale, or as much of it as mattered. I’d never wanted to be known as the girl who slew the Duke. Somehow my name had never come into the matter, for all my infamy since in both cities.
Yet even then, not one person in a hundred on the street would have recognized my name, and far fewer known my face. Infamy was not so much as it might have seemed.
“Marked me, and you sought that mark?”
“That power. The Lily Goddess spoke through Mother Umaavani and warned us of a girl. If we found you and sheltered you, you might be an ally, or even one of us. If we’d missed your coming or just ignored you, you would have been even more dangerous to us than Surali herself has proven to be.”
Something in my heart twinged, shriveling toward sadness at those words. I’d known I was watched once I’d entered the city. I did not realize the Mothers had laid a honeyed trap for me even out upon the rough trackway from Bhopura.
Yet how different was this from me concerning myself with the ghosts and tulpas of Below in Copper Downs? Power was dangerous if not identified, directed, and controlled.
“I suppose I’d thought you took me in because I was a girl lost and alone,” I said stiffly.
“We did,” Mother Vajpai replied. I hated the pity I heard in her voice. She went on: “We are women, and some of us have borne children of our own.”
That remark screamed for a question, but I did not take the bait. Not then. Later, if chance and the turn of conversation permitted. After a brief pause—testing me?—she continued: “We would not have had you starve.”
“You could just as well put me into the kitchen as a scullion. I might be washing pots to this day.”
“I am finding that inconceivable, and so are you finding it as well. You’d already spent your years in that terrible Pomegranate Court, and you’d killed, what, three times? At least? You would no more have scrubbed pots than you would have taken up the mantle of the Prince of the City.”
“The latter is being more likely,” I muttered. Just then I was torn between a sense of flattery and a sense of betrayal, unsure which was the more applicable here.
I knew which was the more useful, though.
“Forget it,” I said, not waiting for her next words. “I might better have not asked, but that knife is thrown and has found a target.” Stopping, I set down my basket of fruit and took her hands. “You and Mother Meiko did well by me. And I do not despair of the Lily Goddess, whatever that foolish Mother Srirani says.”
“You have never followed Her as we do,” Mother Vajpai replied. “Too much time spent too close to power has leached respect for the majesty and might of the divine from your character.”
That made me laugh ruefully. “How much respect for any form of authority have you ever seen in me?”
“Indeed. You are as unseemly a supplicant as I have ever seen approach a god, yet still they listen to you and speak through you.”
I thought about the theories thrown around by Iso and Osi, and from my own reading, of how a channel once opened became easier to use. “An oracle whose one size fits many. Right now my prophetic powers tell me we should get moving again before we draw unwanted attention. Little Kareen shall likely not want our company either, but at least it is ours to deliver.”
“Understood,” Mother Vajpai said. She released my hands. “Green, just so you know … I am proud of you. So very proud. I know Mother Meiko would have been, had she lived this long.”
“Thank you.”
We stalked through a stand of thornbushes, along a winding path, toward some grubby pavilions visible ahead. I tried not to think too much on what had just passed between me and Mother Vajpai, because I did not wish to cry just then.
* * *
A small boy scrambled away from us in a cloud of dust as we passed out of the thorn tree thicket. The sentry—and he had been napping, I was certain. Little Kareen would know, too, and make the child’s life wretched for it.
Most of his boys were out working the crowds. Nighttime was the more natural element for such mountebanks in training, but daytime was when their likeliest victims were available. So the camp was largely deserted. Half a dozen pavilions rose on poles leaning to and fro. Some of their rips had been patched; others were allowed to flex in the desultory wind of the hot early afternoon.
That was more than I remembered. When I dwelled briefly among these lost boys, we’d largely slept on open ground with whatever pallets each boy’s ingenuity could contrive through begging, borrowing, or stealing. Now there was a little iron stove under one roof, with a scattering of mismatched chairs and benches. They had not yet managed to appropriate a table, I saw.
The only true tent, in the sense of having fabric walls and a flapped entrance drawn open, was Little Kareen’s. The child poked his head out as we approached. I figured on several unfriendly eyes watching us from within or nearby, but we were not the sort of armed threat that would provoke swift flight, nor peers enough to them to provoke an automatic fight.
Curiosity was a trait very hard to pound out of the human spirit, even for such as these who lived near the bottom of the great ladder of life in—and around—Kalimpura. They were more free than the peasants, and in some ways lived better than did the laborers within the walls.
Who was I to fault these boys?
I stepped into the tent, only slightly worried about a thrown spear or a crossbow bolt. Clinging to my earlier logic, I straightened in the shadows within. The fug was strong, a close, stale scent of unwashed bodies and dung fire. “Greetings.” My tone was strong and clear, without a quaver. “An old friend comes to call.”
“No one old is my friend,” said a familiar voice out of the darkness. He had lit no lamp, and kept the walls of his tent rolled down tight.
When I had first encountered him, Little Kareen with his fingerless right hand and his ready left fist had been fat, almost to the point of gross, but still brutally efficient in his edicts. He kept two or three boys close to h
and as lieutenants, and once or twice a year had the oldest one thrashed and expelled from the camp for the crime of growing up. Everyone understood the system, and in any event, no one really wanted to spend his life here. It worked, except, presumably, for the occasional ambitious lad who sought Little Kareen’s own position on the top of this particularly stunted social ladder.
Them he had killed. I knew this because he was still here.
“I am Green, come with Mother Vajpai to treat with you.”
“Ah…” The voice was thoughtful and slow. “Green. I had never expected to see you again.” A rustle, as if he’d dipped his chin or shaken his head. All we could see was a shadowed bulk amid other shadows. “And Mother Vajpai. Your fame precedes you. Though you are thought to have left the city by ship. In pursuit of this one, in fact.”
“We have been back in Kalimpura only a few hours,” she said, speaking as if to an equal.
Has it only been a few hours? I was already as overwhelmed as if a month of madness were just passed.
“I would bid you welcome, but that would be a lie. We normally beat or kill strangers who blunder into here.”
“We are not strangers,” I pointed out. “Nor is any boy who grows out of his place here and moves on.”
“Strange enough, Green. You are strange enough.”
I let that ride, taking in the darkness with the other senses the Dancing Mistress had sharpened within me down Below. I knew the size of the place from the outside, and the fabric walls muffled echoes. The floors were covered in carpet or fur, and more must be piled around the edges or light would have glared through where the tent met the ground. The acrid odor of burnt dung signified a stove. Urine as well, and a chamber pot. Also wine, some of it fresh in the air. He was drinking now, or had been just before we came in.
Was Little Kareen such a tippler when I’d known him? I could not recall. As a younger girl, I’d not paid attention to matters of that sort.
