by Jay Lake
I heard the hiss and thump as he caught his breath, startled by me. “Looking for you,” he said after a short, shocked interval.
In point of fact, I’d meant the question more generally, but that was a fair answer. I slid my knife back into my sleeve. “You have found me. Are the boys awakening?”
“Little Kareen decreed we would begin to pass through the Landward Gate starting at dawn. A few at a time, to avoid attention.”
Kalimpura did not have a city watch or any such formal policing. Nonetheless, the walls and gates were guarded by the Prince of the City’s men. Not those foolish peacock warriors who served him as bodyguards, but real guards who might have been watchmen in a city that wanted its streets overseen, as Kalimpura did not. Once you were past the walls, you were on your own here. But they had the right to inspect at the gate. Not just that, but also the right to turn people back.
It was Kalimpura’s way of setting itself apart from the rest of Selistan. Other cities of substance rose to the west and south, but Kalimpura stood alone in this northeast corner of the continent, and served as a port of entry for those coming from beyond the Storm Sea. As well as those arriving from the interior villages. We are different, the gates proclaimed. We are proud.
“So you send them out already?”
“Yes. We think it best if you go early as well.”
Not that the Street Guild kept working hours, but he had a point. They were unlikely to be out in force during the first part of the day. Especially not those who had been drinking last night. Men were men, after all.
“I am coming back,” I said. “We will go robed as servants.”
* * *
My plan of storming the docks with the dawn had melted into the middle hours of the morning by the time I shuffled through the Landward Gate with my basket in my arm and my eyes upon my feet. The guards did not even give me a first glance, let alone a second. That was fine with me. Not that I could not have taken them down handily, but that would have started the fighting too soon.
Penagut and the other senior boys had each escorted a drawn-out string of excited youngsters through the gate, then gone recruiting. Little Kareen knew of the other child-gang bosses, and they certainly knew of him. I’d learned more in the past few hours than I’d ever known there was to learn about their secrets.
Rollers, I now understood, were the younger children who moved in groups and swarmed drunks, the ill, and the unlucky. A man could have his purse taken, his pockets picked, and the sandals off his feet in less than a quick five-count, and be left shouting and swinging his fist at nothing but shadows.
Slitters worked alone or in pairs, walking through the crowds to cut open purses and money pouches from behind and below. In pairs, the second slitter would make a deliberately clumsy pass at the victim while the first finished the job.
Likewise the dodgers, runners, dog-boys, crust-eaters, pickers, flickers, and more. Every one of these boys had a specialty, and some of them were quite good at it. So did the bosses—different gangs tended to concentrate on different aspects of the trade, with a rough division of activities and territories.
It was rarely in any of their interests for the child-gangs to fight openly. In that way, their structure mirrored the Courts and Guilds into which the wealthy and powerful of Kalimpura were organized.
Much like the hierarchy of the gods: as above, so below.
Through his lieutenants, Little Kareen had put out the word that there would be a beggars’ run today. All the rollers and slitters and dodgers and the rest of them, from all over town, were easing toward the docks. Not in a great, armed stream—that would have been obvious. Rather, a general movement of boys and girls aged from three to thirteen or so, edging all in one direction for a change.
If one knew what to look for, it was like watching the turn of the tide.
And as I’d promised Little Kareen, in their numbers, any of them would be anonymous. Even the Street Guild could hardly hunt down and kill every child in the city. No matter how put out they or their masters were.
Mother Vajpai was not with me. She’d entered Kalimpura with another group perhaps half an hour ahead of me. Our plan was to meet at the foot of Agina’s Pier, waiting until the last moment to find each other. We walked apart because the Street Guild were surely looking for a pair of Blades.
I moved along with the mounting flood of children until Penagut had us stop near the Ragisthuri Ice and Fuel bunker. We sidled into an alley, me the tallest of them except for Penagut himself, and took up dicing for a bit. None of them had much notion of the time—a close watch of the hours was more of a Petraean fixation—but even the smallest child could tell when noon arrived.
And so my dawn raid on the docks became a midday riot. When Penagut judged the time to be right, he signaled Little Kareen’s boys with a series of low whistles. Chaos moved out among the merchants and sailors and half a hundred other trades working the waterfront.
In moments, the uproar had transcended deafening. I pushed through the swirl of outraged adults and racing children and rank opportunists of various sorts, intent on finding Mother Vajpai before any of this riot happened to me personally.
* * *
She was right where we’d agreed to meet, close to the spot where we’d fought off our welcoming committee just the day before. So little time for so much to happen, I marveled briefly.
I signaled for us to move up the pier. Some of the stevedores were rapidly setting a makeshift barrier of cargo and timber baulks, but they let two serving women through. If we’d been walking openly as Lily Blades, I wondered if they would have done the same.
Clear of them, we pushed through the crowds toward Prince Enero. Something cracked loudly ahead. A weapon, perhaps, though it sounded more like a small, intense firework. Or possibly thunder of a sort. Wisps of blue smoke eddied from the kettle ship’s deck.
Fire?
Or guns?
That second thought was sickening.
I redoubled my efforts, shedding my robe for the advantage the leathers beneath would give me in clearing my way. Even that did not avail me much, because by now the people on the pier were in full panic. Most of the ships tied up had already pulled in their planks, and I saw more than one crew cutting their lines so as to stand off from the riot.
More thunder echoed ahead. Someone fell screaming from Prince Enero’s rail.
Mother Vajpai was close behind me. She simply could not run as I, not on her poor, mutilated feet. I no longer cared. My long knife I drew into my left hand, the god-blooded short knife in my right.
Now people cleared the way. Some jumped right into the stinking harbor to give me passage.
Moments later, I pushed two armed men into the water between hull and pier to rush up Prince Enero’s ladder. A Street Guildsman climbed ahead of me. I glanced down to confirm the first pair were the same.
By all the Smagadine hells and the broken Wheel besides, they are.
I stabbed up through the nail-studded sole of his boot. The god-blooded blade slid in. He shrieked and looked down at me.
All I had to do was grin, and the man kicked away from the hull to drop toward the water, rather than face me. Unfortunately, he pushed too hard, and smacked his head and shoulders into the stone edge of the pier with a sickening thump.
My grin broadened as I cleared the rail and laid into the two of his Street Guild fellows before me. They’d been fighting several of Lalo’s men, so I had a clear swing at both their backs, and was not afraid to use it.
Honor was for people who could afford to lose. Winning was for the rest of us.
One of the sailors lowered his cutlass, looked at me in amazement, then pointed aft toward our cabin. He tried to tell me something. Even though we shared no language between us, I already knew what he meant.
I charged past the bridge tower, into the breezeway I’d struggled through during the storm, and from there through the hatch that opened on the passengers’ mess. Sounds of fighting e
choed from beyond, and a short, sharp scream.
“No!” I could not run fast enough. The Street Guild were closing in on my children and their protectors.
Perhaps a dozen men clogged the passageway before me. From the far side I saw several more of Prince Enero’s crew with a dismounted iron hatch for a shield. About half the Street Guild present were engaging them, forcing the shield back. The rest shouted into a door, blades stabbing within.
I was close enough to hear Ilona shrieking, and a rhythmic grunting that could only be Mother Argai laying to.
My babies were in there.
The next minute or so passed in a spattering blur and the echo of more guns firing. My long knife snagged on the mailed collar of one Street Guildsman, so I left it there and gutted him like perch with the short knife. From the back I severed spines, slashed through ribs, punctured kidneys, and opened necks the hard way. The first ones died before they could turn to face me. They fell so fast that their fellows did not realize what was come behind them.
The last two by the door I killed to their faces. Screaming, I was screaming, though even then I did not know what words I uttered, and years of memory have not unlocked that since. Whatever I said, they perished with terror bleeding from their eyes.
Mother Argai looked at me, her face stark and pale, then shouted something. It was enough to keep me moving. By now, the five Street Guild farther down the passageway had realized their peril and turned to face me, ignoring the ship’s defending crew.
That was fine. I could kill from the front quite as well as from behind. I kicked off a blood-soaked step to rush them. At my second step, one’s chest exploded from within. Then another’s head. More of that thunder echoed, and the stink of burning and sulfur filled the passageway as if magic were going wrong. The survivors turned one way and the other, knowing they were fatally trapped.
I obliged, breaking two necks and slashing a third. My next strike nearly landed on Lalo, but I pulled my blow to bury the short knife in his ship’s iron bulkhead.
“Enough,” the mate breathed in his Seliu, his voice barely audible over the frightened wailing of my children. I could read terror in his face as well, but also strength. “The deck is ours,” he added.
“I am taking my children and departing.” The snarl hung in my voice as I worried my long knife free.
He nodded. His men, two of them holding long wooden batons with metal rods, just looked terrified as well. No, not batons. Guns, just as I’d thought. But big like crossbows rather than Malice Curry’s little pistol. Only firearms made the stinking, magical thunder.
Spinning once more, I stepped back to the cabin as Mother Vajpai entered the corridor from the far end. “We go now,” I called at Ilona and Ponce and Mother Argai.
All three of them were struck to openmouthed silence as well. “Now!” I repeated.
They moved.
Not two minutes later, we were back on the deck looking down at Agina’s Pier. The riot had stopped, frozen. Everyone on the pier and along the docks ahead was staring at Prince Enero.
In effect, at me.
How very strange, I thought.
Ponce tugged at my arm. “Green,” he whispered over little Federo’s burbling breath. His voice was still, almost strangled.
I turned and looked abaft.
The harbor had risen up behind our ship. It stood quivering in a mountainous slope taller than Prince Enero’s bridge deck, a fist ready to slap down the vessel and everyone foolish enough to still be aboard her. Shivering and still, just like one of those swells from the midocean storm we’d escaped through my prayers. As if the ghost of that weather had come to haunt us now.
Foam raced down the slope, boiling lace straight from the deep waters of the ocean. Dark shapes moved within. Sharks. Monsters. Souls. I could not tell, and did not want to know.
My knees jellied and my bones chilled. This was about me. The sea did not come calling like this for any normal person in any normal moment of life.
Desire, or one of Her brothers Time and Oceanus, or some sending of the Saffron Tower—I could not say. But this thing was focused on me.
“We go,” I said roughly, breaking the spell that held everyone on the deck still as rabbits beneath the circling eagle.
The ladder was clear. I ignored the rushing noise that was now horribly audible. Like a waterfall over my shoulder. People below stared up—this riot had swept up everyone from gutter urchins to grandmothers to shopkeepers. Though we had meant only to create enough of a ruckus to mask our movements, the hatred of the smallfolk for Street Guild who enforced their own brand of false justice along the docks had brought people out in great numbers. All those folk were stilled with the same awe that had just captured me as well.
Little Marya in one arm, my short knife clenched in that same fist, I one-handed slowly down the ladder, dropping the last body length to land on the pier.
The others crept down behind me. It was as if we were afraid of awakening that foaming mountain of water to its duties with respect to gravity. I was sickeningly desperate to be away before that eldritch wave broke.
With any luck, we would be swiftly lost in the crowd. They were riveted by the standing wave, not by us. I slipped my short knife up my sleeve and turned to take one last look up at Prince Enero. As I’d hoped and feared, Lalo stood at the rail, staring back at me.
His face twitched, and he offered me a slow salute, then shooed us on our way. I sketched a bow, then turned and led my little handle into the silent mess we’d made of the waterfront. For the first few steps, it was like weaving through a garden of warm statuary. At least this time, no one stood in my way.
* * *
The water remained poised over Prince Enero’s stern as we reached the Street of Ships. At the foot of the waterfront’s seawall the bottom muck was exposed as if at low tide. Which made sense, a logical part of me declared amid the incipient panic of such bizarre magic behind me. The wave had to be made of water.
Those stilled mountains of stormy rage had been one thing on a ship at sea, alone in the middle of the ocean. They’d had place and purpose and context, for all that it had been a bizarre experience. Here in Kalimpura’s harbor, one of their fellows seemed like a cosmic blunder. Or cosmic threat.
As we turned away from the Street of Ships onto Prince Suravati Street, I heard the water collapse with a thunderous rush. That was immediately followed by screaming. The slop from the wave was loud. It must have swamped Agina’s Pier badly, not to mention the waterfront around there.
I muttered a prayer to Desire and Her brother titanics—whether thanks or supplication, even I could not have said. I hoped that Prince Enero was not much damaged. The ship and its crew had served us better than we deserved.
Mother Argai led through the streets now as dirty seawater lapped at our heels. This was not by discussion, but simply because she pushed ahead. Three blocks inland, there was no sign of the riot or the ocean’s misplaced might. Such was Kalimpura, where the gods could stage the ending of the world on one street and the people thronging the next street over would never notice.
For my part, I felt wrung out. Decisions were beyond me right now. I clutched my child close, kept my head down, and hurried after her. We moved in a huddle. No eye contact, no rough play, just sliding through the crowds.
Eventually our way eased. I looked up—briefly confused, for I had not been attending to our route—and realized we were on Shalavana Avenue. One of the streets where the houses of the wealthy lay cheek by jowl, separated by mere rods of formal garden and modest but high walls.
Traffic was much sparser here, too, and I felt deeply conspicuous. My shoulders itched as if expecting a shot.
Quite soon, Mother Argai led us to a small servants’ gate at one corner of a walled property. She even had a key for the brass lock, to my considerable surprise. She must have been carrying that all the way to Copper Downs and back. The gate was jammed, but a moment with her shoulder and it creaked open. That
in turn popped the lead and wax temple and Guild seals that showed this place enjoyed strong protection. We filed through into an overgrown garden where insects hummed and frogs peeped and no one had seemingly walked for years.
We are lying quiet in an empty house. I had not known there was such a thing here in Kalimpura, where every corner belongs to some beggar and her family. At least there is paper here, and ink stones with fine metal nibs for writing.
Though I am consecrated, and therefore a priestess in my own right, I have never been much for ritual. My relationship with the gods has been far more prosaic than hieratic.
Yet today a miracle happened. It was not the little magic of a heeded prayer or a quiet sacrifice. Some power, and I suspect several, made a show in front of half the city. Or at least all of the waterfront.
I do not understand it, and I am frightened. Has the ocean decided to follow me like a dog?
You do not have these answers, I know. But you are one of the few who might understand the questions.
I lay awake in the late afternoon light, naked, exhausted, and wondering that something as simple as a gun could make a man’s chest explode. To kill so carelessly from more than striking distance and at the speed of thought was a frightening power to hand anyone.
Yet I had seen it for myself.
We occupied a silent mansion. Much of the furniture was draped in coarse muslin, though that was grimy and in some places water-stained. Our footprints on the floor were the first in months or possibly even years, judging from the thickness of the dust there. Mother Argai had said very little once we’d gained entry to the house—which took some doing, given the little golden monkeys in the garden who’d pelted us with sticks and dung. Exhausted, she had lain down on a settee, not even bothering to remove the cover. She was still sleeping when I’d finally retreated with my children to an inner room with a strange, high bed of teak ornately carved in some style I did not recognize, the ceiling painted with frescoes out of Selistani myth and legend.
Marya and Federo were fed, and slept now as well. I had nibbled on fruit gathered by Ponce from the garden despite the threat of monkeys, but rest eluded me. Too much to do, too many questions to resolve. We were no closer to rescuing our missing than we had been on sailing into the harbor. All we’d gained thus far was the apparent safety of this refuge.
