by Jay Lake
I was not sure what would come later.
* * *
I thought our pursuit would not be hard, but I had not figured on the slow, leaping pace of the festival crowd. The gyrations of the people around us were both contagious and dangerous. Once, I had to subdue a dancer with his own rice flails to keep him from cracking everyone else around him in the head.
And we could not walk scowling as our target did. I’d already slipped out of—and lost—my robe and veil. Even as Blades, Mother Argai and I both needed to blend with the festival crowd or be marked out, especially once we left the Evenfire Gate District and moved around toward the Landward Gate and, among other things, the more usual haunts of the Street Guild.
So we danced our way, and shouted from time to time, and grinned when we were grinned at. It was foolish and delightful at once. Like a parody of a Blade run. And much as with being at the center of the beggars’ riot, I felt safe among the crowd. Let the Street Guild try to take me here, I thought.
I grinned for real at that.
It was, however, deeply tiring.
* * *
In time the procession circled the city and proceeded along the Street of Ships until they turned up Savvatana Street and ended at the Rice Exchange. Of course that made sense. We were deep in Street Guild territory now, and fairly close to the Blood Fountain and the Temple of the Silver Lily.
Not precisely among friends. I was beginning to regret casting away my veil. Though I’d hated the pretense of being Sindu.
Mother Argai led me aside into a shadow between the pillars of the Rice Exchange’s façade. These were great, squat-bellied things painted green and red as if grasses grew before a bloody pool. I could not say so much for the taste of our accidental hosts, but we were able to lurk quietly and watch as the festival broke up in earnest.
Most people just drifted off, of course. Many of them carried the party to Prince Kittathang Park, I was certain. The banyans there were gentle shelter against the brief, intense rains that often came at evening, and no one would bother to run them out unless these folk began to set fires or otherwise significantly disturb the peace.
Laborers from the Guild of Poppet Dancers came and helped the mummers undo their masks. They loaded the demon statues onto a cart. My Red Man climbed aboard among the statues and sat quietly there until one of the laborers threw a length of sacking across his shoulders as a cloak.
Two score paces across the square, I could hear his rumbled thanks. His Seliu has a Petraean accent. Firesetter had come here from the Stone Coast, though I did not imagine for a moment that my quarry originally hailed from Copper Downs, any more than I did.
“Him,” I whispered to Mother Argai, jabbing my finger.
With this confirmation, we were so much closer to finding Corinthia Anastasia and Samma than we had been since arriving in this city. I clasped myself with shivering joy.
I signed to her that I planned to follow the cart. She leaned close, grabbed my wrist, and tapped out the Blade code that meant she would join me.
Home, I responded. Meaning, Go home and tell them what is afoot.
She shook her head.
Well, I understood the reluctance to let me run around by myself, given recent events. I would have felt much the same had our roles been reversed.
Still, I wanted word to go to Mother Vajpai and the others. More to the point, I did not want to let Firesetter out of my sight.
There was small purpose in further argument. We waited until the cart creaked into motion, along with three others belonging to—or hired by—the Poppet Dancers. Then we followed.
If there is one thing Blades have the skill to do, it is pursue our quarry through the streets of Kalimpura, our city.
* * *
My breasts ached enough that they began to leak as Mother Argai and I slipped through the dark of the evening. The wagons followed a meandering route that I soon realized was meant to minimize the number of tight turns the drivers and their teams would be forced to make.
We kept up easily. The Poppet Dancers were in no hurry. I saw the spark of flints and the glow of pipes from the buckboards of two of their wagons. These were men drawing near the end of their day. Their heaviest props were probably those statues, and everything the wagons hauled was meant to be carried by people dancing in the streets, so their unloading would not be overtaxing.
The carts passed through several areas of increasingly ramshackle warehouses and businesses. They avoided streets with large houses even when those would have shortened what I guessed was their route to the cheapest districts near the landward gate. The patient oxen seemed to know their way.
We were moving slowly enough for me to claim a pair of skewers with dripping bird thighs upon them from a wraith-thin woman wrapped in ragged gray who tended a little grill beneath a dead banyan tree. I overpaid her from the handful of paisas I’d accumulated living in our safe house—we’d found several small jars of coins tucked here and there, the caches of servants or children.
The meat was hot and almost sweet upon my tongue. She’d marinated it in honey and orange peels, which impressed me. The food was a sufficient distraction from my thoughts of my children. They were safe enough, and so was I. We were not walking into the faces of our enemies here. Whatever Firesetter might be to me, I did not fear him.
Foolish as that possibly was, when he climbed aboard the wagon, I had not seen in those great, dull eyes the kind of anger that would have made me afraid.
Mother Argai slurped at the last of her bird, then cast the wooden skewer in the gutter along with the bones she’d passed over. I dropped my bones, but kept my skewer by the simple expedient of sliding it into my hair and ignoring the grease. At the moment, it was long enough to need coiling up when I was working, and so the skewer did handy duty in place.
After a while, the carts rumbled onto Geelatti Road, which ran roughly parallel to the Bounded Road here along the northern verge of the city. As I’d expected, we were not too far from the Landward Gate. This was an area of large, decaying warehouses, left over from the days when some trade had required high roofs and large courtyards, before moving on to better markets or fancier quarters.
The Poppet Dancer carts passed through an open gate, their wheels echoing on the cobbles. The oxen were obviously eager to be home. I glanced at Mother Argai. Our eyes met, but neither of us seemed to feel too much caution here, so we simply walked in after the last cart.
The courtyard was fairly large, enough for the four wagons to pull into a semicircle. Several more were parked around the margins. A stable was open-walled in the back of the court, the familiar smell of livestock emitting from the shadows there. Otherwise we were surrounded by high wooden walls with enormous doors, one of which had been thrown open. The gate through which we’d passed had been nothing but a passage in the street-facing wall. Torches of twisted straw set into cressets illuminated the scene with dancing shadows edged orange. Everything was in need of paint, of care, of attention, of time and money that no one here had, clearly.
Already they were unloading. The laborers were mostly older men, some of them stooped or lame. I wondered if they had been mummers once, or were cheaper in their hire due to age and infirmity. Several glanced incuriously at me, but no one seemed alarmed.
The Red Man slid off the tailboard of his wagon. All he really needed do was stretch his legs and stand. His eyes met mine, and now his gaze was not nearly so dull. In fact, he almost glowed.
I met his look with a nod. We had acknowledged each other. With a brush to Mother Argai’s wrist, I turned and left the mummers’ men to their work. We passed out into Geelatti Road and rousted a trio of beggars from their shelter within a good-sized crate across the way. There we settled down to watch.
* * *
After a while, I was bored. I looked over at Mother Argai. She appeared to be sleeping with her eyes open.
Small harm in trying. “No Blade run is likely to pass us here, I suppose.”
“No,” she said shortly. “But the Street Guild might be by here sooner or later. They patrol warehouses.”
“Whenever they happen to recall that they are supposed to be more than a gang,” I said ungraciously. Not incorrectly, however.
Late-working merchants passed us by with the occasional nervous glance. Most of them had a stout lad or two walking alongside, many carrying a good-sized staff. Because of the Death Right, people in Kalimpura generally didn’t bother with edged weapons unless they had the means to back themselves up. For the most part, that meant criminals, the larger groups of private guards, and whoever carried weapons for the Courts and Guilds.
And the Blades, of course.
We were supposed to be Kalimpura’s weapons. Just of late I was learning how much of the city stood outside our view. Outside our notions of justice. The Sindu and their practices. The Quiet Men, whoever they truly were. Paths within paths, hidden in plain sight.
This was knowledge that would serve me in good stead later on, but at the time it was something like becoming aware of a toothache. Nagging, painful, and not much subject to resolution at any command of mine.
Besides the merchants, servants passed. Laborers, too, often in little knots as they all left their employment for the night. Twice the sleeping carts that never stopped trundling about the city went by as well. Presumably the laborers were large among their custom. A few children out playing the dark. A self-important clerk in a green salwar kameez, pressed as if for an appearance before a judge even in this late evening.
I tried to amuse myself making up stories, but my imagination was consumed with Firesetter, while my body ached for my children. Wishing I had Mother Argai’s knack for sleeping whenever there was opportunity, I wound up watching the gate across the road and the occasional glimpses of folk moving beyond it.
From what I could tell, the Red Man was unloading the wagons. Of course he would do so. He was large and strong and could probably shift more than any three of those men. That he bothered to help them told me much about him.
In time the wagons were drawn away from my view. Shadows deepened in the courtyard as the torches guttered out or were doused. The laborers departed, querulous and bickering as old friends will be after a day of working hard.
The last person to come out was Firesetter himself. He wore a long shapeless cloak that made him seem a gigantic scarecrow who had lurched to life. A huge dark figure was probably preferable to being a huge red figure.
A very small, draggled woman followed him out. The apsara! I struggled for her name, until it came to me: Fantail.
Firesetter walked straight for me. “You are Green,” he said in a voice that rumbled into my bones.
I was shocked.
Mother Argai’s eyes flashed open, and she grinned.
“Hello, Firesetter,” I finally managed to reply.
We stared at each other in the dark like old friends who had never met before.
* * *
They knew of a basement two blocks down where Firesetter claimed that a quiet woman served sour beer and people rarely asked questions. Before we left, he pulled the warehouse gates shut. A rippled length of iron as big around as my two thumbs together dangled on the bars of one side of the gate. Firesetter took it in his hands and absently twisted it to bind the two sides together.
“Better than any lock,” I whispered.
“Harder to pick, too.” The apsara’s voice was much more pleasant than her aspect. I began to wonder if the dragglement were a guise or truly her appearance.
“Discouraging,” added Mother Argai. She seemed fascinated by Firesetter, in a way I had never seen her respond to a man.
“Um, yes,” I added. “Shall we go?”
We walked along the shadowed gutter, avoiding the center of the road. The basement proved almost three blocks away, down a flight of narrow, rubbish-strewn stairs to which I would never have given a second look. Beyond was a low-ceiling taproom that Firesetter very nearly had to waddle through to reach a huge chair at the back. Just as I’d expected, except I’d been looking in the wrong part of Kalimpura. He tugged a table in front of his seat, while we collected three more ordinary chairs.
I was not so keen to sit with my back to the door, but I wanted to face him.
Cheap, sour beer was forthcoming in shallow bowls at a copper paisa for every two. People came to this place to get drunk, I realized, not to sit and drink. The four or five others in the room paid us no more mind than they paid the rotten rushes on the floor.
“So you are here,” I said carefully once our bowls were settled and the old woman was back to her laconic busyness behind the rough-hewn bar.
Firesetter rumbled something into his bowl—it was, like the chair, bigger than ours. “We have been for months,” Fantail answered. “Living quietly among the Poppet Dancers.”
“It is a brilliant disguise,” I admitted. “When I finally sorted out what you had done, I was amazed. We spent much time around the Evenfire Gate trying to pick up your trail.”
“Hmm,” said Mother Argai, still transfixed by Firesetter. What had gotten into her?
“Did not like that place.” The Red Man’s voice echoed like rocks on more rocks.
Fantail brushed a hand against his arm. “We were safe enough.” The lilt in her Seliu was far stranger even than Firesetter’s accent. “But it was difficult to go in and out. The longer you live among the Sindu, the more they come to expect you to understand and follow their rules.”
This time his voice was an earthquake rumble. “Enough rules.”
“Indeed.” I couldn’t see yet how to introduce what I most desperately wanted to ask. These two were so clearly in hard luck, and so clearly tired of whatever they’d been running from. Or toward.
“Mummers are not so bad,” he added. “They do not mind what I am. And no one has tried to rob the warehouse since I tore the head off that obnoxious little man.”
Definitely a northern accent in his Seliu, though now that I was hearing him speak at greater length, I was not so sure if Firesetter had learned the language among Petraeans or farther east along the north margin of the Storm Sea.
“We all abide where the world brings us.” I cursed myself for uttering such foolishly pious words. “I must ask, though, how did you know me?”
His rejoinder was quick and to the point. “How did you know me?”
“No one looks like you.”
A great red hand reached across the width of the table to brush my scarred cheek with an astonishing gentleness. “No one looks like you, either, Green.”
“Probably not,” I admitted. “But how did you know of me at all?”
“People speak of you. We were fresh to Kalimpura when the Prince set sail for the north. We heard that the Bittern Court hunted you all the way across the Storm Sea.”
“That alone makes you something of a hero in certain places of this city,” Fantail added. “If you were to be declaring yourself, many would stand behind you.”
“Declare myself for what?” I asked with disgust. “Copper Downs gave me my fill of civic politics. Enough for the rest of my life, I am quite certain of it.”
Firesetter waved my words away. “The rich grow wealthier while the poor starve a little more each year.”
Mother Argai finally spoke, though there was something brittle in her voice. “When I was a girl, the Guilds and Courts still hired many. They have become more about money and less about the people of Kalimpura.”
“And the Bittern Court is central to all of this, of course,” I said.
“Bittern Court, yes.” She sipped her bowl, as if to cover some confusion, before saying in a swift rush, “I was born in Attarapa.”
I had no idea what that blurted statement meant, as I had never heard of Attarapa. I had also never heard Mother Argai speak of her past. Firesetter stared at her briefly with a bland expression. A tiny smile crossed Fantail’s face, so fleeting I was not certain I had seen it.
Disapp
ointment flooded Mother Argai’s expression for a longer moment, before being replaced by resolution. “In the Stickleridge Mountains, just north of the Fire Lakes,” she added.
Firesetter’s face transformed from bland to predatory in the space of a breath. “You know,” he said, followed by a burst of words in a language I did not recognize.
Mother Argai answered with a few fumbling, halting words of her own in that language before switching back to Seliu. “No,” she continued. “You were gods to us.”
“Did you ever meet any of my people?” The pain in his voice was strange to hear. Like watching a shark beg.
“Distant gods,” Mother Argai amended herself. “Vanished.” She stared down into her beer.
In the silence that followed, I realized I couldn’t speak to whatever was between them. History, future, fascination; it was not a problem for today. Instead, I brought the conversation back to the present. “What do you want? Surely not to be lying low in a warehouse for the rest of your days.”
“We have been looking,” Fantail answered. “And waiting.”
“For what?…”
“My people.” Firesetter shivered, then gripped the edge of the table so hard, it splintered. The wood around his fingers smoldered.
Fantail brushed her hand lightly down his arm and murmured a few words I could not distinguish.
He nodded, chin tucked low, and hunched in on himself.
“Great spells have been set around him,” she explained. “From the time he was whelped. Some questions cannot be asked without the risk of provoking him to great violence at their very words.” At my expression, Fantail hastily added, “Against his will.”
“The Saffron Tower did this to him?” I asked, my voice tight.
“Yes.” By her tone, she seemed unsurprised that I knew of them.
“They sent you to Copper Downs.”
A nod from Fantail. Firesetter still studied the wood grain of the table as if his life depended on it. Or possibly our lives.
