by Jay Lake
“Sensible, careful,” I echoed. “Those are qualities for which I am justly famed.”
They laughed at that, which pleased me.
“Well…” I offered my most pleasant smile. “We are here, and free to talk as we will. So, what do we do today?”
* * *
What we did that day was rest quietly in the shadowed house while Mother Argai slipped out for food and rumors. I was much sore and strained from the previous two days of effort. Heartsick, too, at being cast out from the Temple of the Silver Lily.
I did give her my letters to Chowdry, tied up neatly in a packet. Several of the freight brokers down along the Street of Ships would arrange correspondence to foreign ports for a suitable fee. I had no money, and so far as I knew, neither did Mother Argai. Still, both the temple as a whole and the Blades in particular maintained accounts at various businesses—something I’d been only vaguely aware of, if at all, when last I was here. Only now did I realize our order of the Lily Blades might actually be wealthy in its own right.
The economic and social activities of the temple were far more significant to me than they had been in the past. Business, after all, was driven by money. And money had to be somewhere at the heart of Mother Srirani’s betrayals of her Sisters.
“What do you believe is behind this rending between the Justiciars and the Blades?” I asked Mother Vajpai. We sat in the front parlor of the house. Tall windows were blocked by more shutters, but bars of sunlight stabbed across the room to illuminate the teak floors and rolled-up carpets. Federo and Marya cooed and giggled at one another on a nest of muslin furniture covers. They were surely quite far from words yet, but both my children had recently become enthralled with the noises that they could make with their soft little mouths.
I myself sat in finer estate. With its embroidered silk cushions and intricately carved arms and backrest, the chair I occupied would have fetched a fortune from the right buyer in Copper Downs; Mother Vajpai’s was no less ornate and elaborate. Here in Kalimpura, they were just old furniture in a forgotten house.
“Power flows back and forth.” Her voice mused. “As I told you before, the usual trend is between the permissive and the careful. Of this last decade or so, well … Let me say first I do not believe Mother Srirani to be venal, and even less do I suspect Mother Umaavani before her.”
“Do you suspect someone else high in their—no, our—councils of taking bribes?”
“Not that.” She sighed. “A temple is not a business. We do not have incomes from manufactures or goods traded or labor hired out.”
“I always assumed there were offerings…,” I began, then stopped. How many women from outside came to services? It was mostly my Sisters in the temple. Or was all our wealth in donations such as this house?
“Gifts, more like it. We hold a special place in the lives of women in Kalimpura, from the very great who might offer us ten thousand silver paisas at the birth of a daughter, to the beggar who calls at the back alley with a handful of wilted flowers to grace a Mother’s table.”
Flowers were all well and good, but it cost money to maintain a roof or fix plumbing. The economies of estates were a subject well covered in my education at the Factor’s house. I’d simply not been thinking of such on my last sojourn here among the Blades.
“I would assume those larger gifts are kept against future need, rather than spent in the moment.”
“Well, yes. There are counting houses here in Kalimpura who will hold money over time, or notes written against property, and pay out extra portions in return. They make back the expense from lending out funds elsewhere at higher charges.”
Copper Downs actually had a banking system, an innovation originally borrowed from the Hanchu if I understood the history correctly. Letters of credit were critical to a city that lived on trade. While Kalimpura was also a substantial port, much more of its economy came from the surrounding lands and more distant precincts. It did not live and die by what came through the waterfront from distant shores.
“This I understand.”
“Well, if those … investments … are poorly made, or poorly guarded, money can be lost. A special form of theft.”
That line of reasoning led in an obvious direction. “And a special form of thief might arrange such losses.”
Mother Vajpai looked both surprised and pleased at my comment. “Well, yes. You have the right of that, Green. What some of us believe has happened is manipulations among the counting houses by the Bittern Court have forced our temple funds into loss. This would be part of a larger game.”
“Sap the temple’s power, and it follows that the Blades lose power. She could arrange in time to have the Death Right granted to the Street Guild.”
We had long held the Death Right in part because the Lily Blades were generally seen as both honest and disinterested. Neither of those things could be said of the Street Guild, even by their most ardent admirers, should they have any. And the Street Guild served the Bittern Court.
“The game of rulership. But there is another layer to all this.”
“Always there is another layer,” I said ruefully, thinking of my own experiences with the no-less-lethal politics of Copper Downs.
“Surali was once an Aspirant in our temple.”
That shocked me into amazed silence. I’d had no notion. “A Blade Aspirant?” I finally managed to choke out in little more than a whisper. Had it been her family who’d given this house? The irony of that would have beggared belief.
“Yes. We trained together awhile, until she was ordered to leave.”
“Why?” There was an event that had echoed down the years. No wonder the Bittern Court woman had hated the temple. And me? How did her animosity toward me fit into this? I knew why she hated me now, but the origins of that despisal had never been clear.
“She killed another Aspirant.” As I opened my mouth, Mother Vajpai raised a hand to halt my words. “Not in the training rooms, though that can happen. When it does, we do not name it a crime. Weapons are, well, weapons. No, she strangled poor Gilles in her bed.”
“In the dormitories? Before the other girls?”
“I tried to stop her.” Mother Vajpai’s voice was decades distant in that moment. “But I had come too late. Surali denied everything before Mother Meiko and the Temple Mother. I had seen her, so had some of the other girls, and still she denied.”
“Why?”
“Love, I think.” The distance still rang in Mother Vajpai’s voice. “Gilles had lain with Surali awhile, then moved on to another girl who had also let Surali go.”
“We do not kill for love,” I said without considering my words.
That brought her back into the moment. “How many have you killed for love of your children?”
“Not the same,” I insisted, flushed with a sudden, wounded pride.
“Hmm.” Mother Vajpai gave me a long, slow appraisal, one of the bars of light making a glowing spot on her cheek that caught at my own eye so that I could not match her gaze. “Surali was sent home in disgrace. She had been fostered, not given over. Her mother forced the girl to servitude in her own house. She won her way back up through sheer ruthlessness, and entered the employ of the Bittern Court in her father’s footsteps. Always she has harbored a grudge against the temple and the Lily Blades.
“But to conspire against us? That took a bigger game than mere vengeance. Surali is not too proud to claim her retribution when she can, but she is not so stupid as to fight just for that.”
I waited to see if Mother Vajpai had anything more to add to this remarkable story. She lapsed into silence, so I joined her there. It did not take great intelligence to guess who this other girl had been in the triangle between Surali and Gilles. Such tangled love could destroy both hearts and lives.
Still, I tried to imagine carrying a hate so hot for long enough to wait a generation’s time to destroy an entire temple and everyone in it.
Unfortunately for me, I could imagine that. I
could also, for the first time ever, summon a bit of sympathy for Surali.
In time I was to realize that it would have been better if I had simply gone on hating her.
* * *
Mother Argai returned later that day. Though she was not breathing hard, I could tell she had run. I mimed drawing a blade, meaning to ask, Street Guild? without alarming Ponce or Ilona.
She nodded, her face uneasy. They knew we were in the city, but I trusted Mother Argai to have shaken her pursuit before returning to this place. Still, she must have been followed awhile. My fellow Blade could not have fought them, not with the woven sack she carried. It was full of vegetables and flatbreads, along with a selection of spreads, pastes, and spices. In another time, I might have admired the cloth of the sack itself and the workmanship that had gone into it, but I was bursting for news of the city, of Samma, of Corinthia Anastasia. Even of her pursuit.
Any news at all.
We gathered in the kitchen once more to share out jicama and taro. Mother Argai chopped with one of the house’s cooking knives, a twinkle in her eyes replacing her earlier veiled look of worry. She was enjoying keeping us waiting. Looking around, I realized she was enjoying keeping me waiting.
“I was pursued,” she reported finally. “The Street Guild are being oafs and fools, and so I lost them in the Greater Beast Market hunting me among the mounds of camel dung.”
I snorted at that. Ponce smiled nervously. She had found a way to warn us of the danger without causing panic.
“Indeed, you are a mighty quarry,” I replied in Petraean.
No one seemed to catch the joke. Mother Argai raised an eyebrow at me, though, before going on. “I have heard nothing of our lost girls.”
It would have been surprising if anyone had spoken rumors of Corinthia Anastasia—who was she here, besides another child more pale than usual?—but a Lily Blade being held captive was the sort of thing that would spark talk. “No word of Samma at all?”
Mother Argai sighed. “None.” She focused a few moments on the chopping, to the point where my hands itched to step in and do it myself. “The wave did quite a bit of damage along the Street of Ships,” she reported finally. “At least a dozen were crushed or drowned.” The gleam was gone from her eyes now.
I felt a rush of guilt. People died because of me too often, but they were usually people who deserved it. Or at least had chosen violence. When innocents died because of me, that felt different.
And every one of those lost had been someone’s baby once. I would light the candles again tonight.
“Is there talk of who raised it?” I asked.
She shook her head. “Yes and no. A dozen rumors. Each as clearly ridiculous as the last. No one is speaking of the Lily Goddess.”
After a short, painful wait, I could no longer contain myself. “… or of me?”
“Or of you, Green.”
In truth, who would? The crew of Prince Enero ought to have a very good idea, but I doubted they were passing rumors over the rail. Not about this. Very few of them spoke Seliu, and having been invaded during the riot, I could only imagine how much they wished to cast off and depart.
“Was our ship damaged?”
“I do not know.” She took a bite of the flatbread dipped in gazpacho paste. I waited for Mother Argai to finish chewing, illogically resenting her need for food.
Finally, she spoke again. “The Bittern Court has closed down all loading and unloading along the waterfront to ensure order, or so they say. The Harbormaster has likewise ordered all vessels to remain in place.”
“That won’t last long,” observed Mother Vajpai. “Too much money tied up in blocked slips and stalled cargo.”
I quickly translated all this into Petraean for Ilona and Ponce.
Ponce glanced at Mother Argai. “The wave was right behind Prince Enero. Will the Bittern Court or whoever not question them?”
“The wave was at the head of Agina’s Pier,” said Mother Vajpai in his language. “So yes, perhaps to question them, but also to question a dozen other captains.”
“I do not think the officers or crew will say anything useful, even if the Bittern Court or the Harbormaster comes calling,” I added. Lalo would not let that happen.
“It is not as if they are not already looking for you, Green,” Ilona said. “And really, all of us.”
“No,” I replied, agreement in my tone of voice despite my denial. “But some suspicions drive more passion than others. Surali’s vengeance is essentially a private matter, even if it is a private matter involving scores of Street Guild goons. A dockside riot, well, this is Kalimpura. But calling an outside force like that wave? Threatening, then damaging the waterfront? And people being killed in so, so … baroque … a fashion. If more thought I had a role in that last, yes, more would be looking for me.”
“Did you call the wave?” Mother Argai asked in her thickly accented Petraean.
That was the crux of the matter here. Why they’d all been so strangely tense with me the night before. That was where our trust in one another had gone.
“I know this was not some small miracle of rain and flowers,” I said slowly, picking my words not so much for their sake as for mine. “Those little miracles are easy. Like frost on the window.” A metaphor that would have been lost on any Selistani who had not at some point in her life spent a winter north of the Storm Sea. “But I cannot call rain and flowers any more than I can summon power from the vasty deep.”
“You prayed the ocean still.” Mother Vajpai was obviously picking her own words with similar care. “That is a power, or a magic, far beyond the reach of even the most blesséd among our people’s holy. Rain and flowers might at most move someone’s heart. To halt a storm…”
We were once more at odds amid mistrust, clearly. At least they were acting less emotional about the whole business. Today I did not feel so much at risk of being cast out.
“I did not halt the storm. Some other power did, yes, at my prayer. I called something great.” Even admitting that was painful, for all the time we’d spent picking at such questions in the later part of our voyage aboard Prince Enero. “Likely a titanic, as I’ve said before. But this is still me.”
With an almost vapid look at me, Ponce spoke up again. “It followed you to the harbor here. That is another kind of danger. Or you summoned it in your fit of anger.”
Even his words brought a flash of red heat behind my eyes. “My children were at risk. I fought like a thing possessed, perhaps. But I did not call the ocean to my bidding.”
Mother Vajpai nodded at that. “It is difficult to say which is more troublesome—that you would have the power to call such things at will, or that they would come to you unsummoned.”
She certainly had a point. Time for more care with my words, though I was decidedly tiring of this topic. I saw no end to this but deeper discomfort and an increasingly large sense of threat all around. “I suspect something was come to collect a price deferred by that unnatural calm at sea.”
“Something that came at the moment of your need,” Mother Argai said in Seliu, then went back to eating.
I had no answer to that, and no one else seemed inclined to add to it, so we all fell to our small meal.
* * *
There is truly no end to the marvels one can work with olive oil, a few kinds of beans, and a bit of spice and flavor. I had asked for an oil stove, if such a thing could be found, that we might at least warm stock and possibly grill some of these fine fruits and vegetables without making smoke in the chimneys to betray our presence in the house. For that day, I contented myself transforming the somewhat eccentric collection of provisions brought by Mother Argai into a more delectable selection of foods.
Ponce scoured the pantries and passageways for anything still edible that might have been overlooked when the house was last closed up. I chartered him to be especially watchful for pickles, vinegary sauces, and cured meats. Bringing them to me one by one, he found occasions to brush
his arm against mine, or favor me with an extra smile.
Ilona worked close beside me, grinding and chopping and mixing as I did. Though her entire cottage could have fit within this massive kitchen, there was still an element of our old times together cooking rabbits and apples. My heart was eased by her closeness, by the hold her scent had upon me. I found occasions to brush my arm against hers, or favor her with an extra smile.
It was good to feel something between us besides loss and regret, if only for a little while.
I was itching to be away after our missing hostages, but the senior Mothers were right. This was not the moment to stir further trouble in the city. Especially with the Street Guild on alert for us.
Within a day or two, the wave would be just another piece of Kalimpuri street chatter, the novelty overtaken by some festival procession or funeral or bloody murder in the marketplace. We were not a people given to obsession over events, not in our public lives. Deeper grudges might last decades or even generations, but daily life in Kalimpura was an ever-changing carnival without end.
Sometimes I’d wondered if a lack of winter season did this. Along the Stone Coast, and in the lands rising to the north, people spent months mostly or entirely indoors. Plenty of time to focus on the smallest elements in their lives, while the public square remained largely empty except for those scurrying unfortunates out in the weather.
Not literally true, of course, but close enough. Down here, though, even peasants like my father enjoyed three or four harvests every year. Farmers in the distant north saw their fields lie fallow for months between the last burning and the first plowing.
Life was so different. I wondered how Corinthia Anastasia was bearing up, what they had her doing. Was Samma with her, or were they separated?
“Do you suppose,” I asked Ilona quietly, “that our missing girls are permitted to cook? Or kept in silent rooms all the day long?”
Ilona’s knife suddenly chopped very hard and fast through some old, hard onions before pattering to a halt. “We are close to them, Green. I feel as if I could walk out the front gate and discover my daughter.”
