by Jay Lake
“After you left, they sent another pair.”
“Ah.” Her eyes left mine briefly, then returned. “Who?”
“Twins. A pair of older Hanchu men named Iso and Osi. I was much deceived by them at first.”
“We know them.” Her voice was so tight, I could have cut with it. “What … what became of these twins?”
“They slew the goddess Marya.” At my words, Fantail winced but did not speak up. I continued, memories flooding me. “They very nearly did for another god, but were brought down. They did not rise again with their lives in their hands.”
She gasped. “You slew them?”
That brought me back into the moment. “Me, personally? No. But yes, I was responsible for their ending.” If you could call it that, praying down the women who’d followed Desire’s daughters, and having them touch those two strange old men to death.
Fantail touched Firesetter’s arm again. He, too, was gone from this place and moment. She seemed to be calling him back.
Finally he stopped shivering and looked up. The glow in his eyes had died. The wood where his fingers rested was no longer smoldering.
“She slew the twins,” the apsara told her Red Man.
“They were…” Words rumbled unspoken in his mouth. Then: “Difficult.”
I had a sense that this man had known difficult much as I had known difficult. “We need your help,” I said, an appeal from one lost child to another.
Firesetter shook his head. Fantail glanced from him to me and back. Something between desperation and hope gleamed in her eyes. Mother Argai tracked this, staring intently at the apsara.
“What do you wait here for if not change?” I was speaking to her now, more than to him.
“We spent three years in the Fire Lakes,” she said quietly. “A hotter, drier, scantier hell you could not imagine even if you were a god and the land awaited molding. We never found a sign of his people.”
“Legends,” breathed Mother Argai. “As a girl, I was taught that his kind had passed on into time’s embrace.”
“Legends walk every day,” I pointed out. “A legend is just a story made bold by time and distance.” Uncomfortably, I was reminded of what Ilona had said about the tales Prince Enero would carry away from here regarding that business in the harbor. That first round of business in the harbor.
“We know.” Her face closed. “We hunted goddesses for the Saffron Tower for almost three decades.”
Hunting deities was about like hunting legends, I should have thought. I wondered how many Maryas had been struck down by them. “In my childhood, I was trained to kill a certain person. Or at least a certain kind of person.” I did not speak of this often, and my own words surprised me. “The two of you must have been fostered with similar purpose.”
She nodded. Firesetter’s stare settled on me with the smoldering power of a forge’s flame.
I continued. “I would also imagine a similar discipline. And cruelty.”
“There are things I cannot even say, or think, about myself.” Desperation rumbled in his voice. He began to shake as he went on. “They told me I was a made thing, that there was only a single one of me anywhere on the plate of the world. When I found out differently, in Copper Downs, we came here looking for my k-kind. I hoped they could loosen these invisible chains.”
“Indivisible chains,” Fantail added.
Firesetter’s hands had begun to smolder again.
“Your people have passed into myth.” I looked at Mother Argai again. She still seemed awestruck, or perhaps lovestruck. I could not tell. That disturbed me, coming from this capable, sanguine woman. “But you have not.”
“Can you find them?” Fantail asked, pleading.
“I do not know.” It was my turn to study my hands as the odor of scorched wood rose around us. “Any promises I make now are empty. I hold no power but that of my arms and mind. The Fire Lakes are unknown to me, and so I can bring no understanding to this.”
Meeting their gazes once more, I continued. “But once I prevail in my current business, I can turn my attention to persuading the Temple of the Silver Lily to putting its resources toward helping you. Over three hundred capable women, access to libraries and funds, and a goddess who can be an oracle.” I shot Mother Argai another look. “And at least one of us who does know the Fire Lakes.”
She nodded with a smile that bordered on the idiotic.
“But I need something in return,” I added.
“Every bargain must have its coin.” Fantail brushed her fingers down Firesetter’s arm again. Calming him? Or herself. He seemed to be finding his control once more. I wondered why I had not been frightened at such an obvious and powerful anger on his part.
No, I realized, not anger. That was why I was not frightened. He was not angry at me, or perhaps at anyone at all. Firesetter was in the grips of some cruel spell or curse or prayerful binding that kept him from his own essence.
He might be dangerous—almost certainly was—but he was not ill-intended.
“My coin is this,” I explained, my words coming fresh on the heels of that new insight. “I need your help in fighting the Saffron Tower.” As she opened her mouth, I held up my hand. “Not directly. We do not face them in some battle in this place. But their schemes reach here. It is my hope to learn from you of their methods and purposes, that I might turn that against my own enemies who are allied with the Saffron Tower against me and mine.”
If nothing else, it was a pretty little speech.
“No,” rumbled Firesetter. “We will not oppose them.”
“You have left their service,” I said.
“That does not mean we stand against the Tower.”
We were at a point of frustration. I did not know how to move them away from his objection. What I could offer was not sufficient.
“In the mountains above my village,” said Mother Argai, her voice distant, “there was a place we called a temple. Building, cave, ruin. It was all three. With doors cut for people half a rod tall. Blackened troughs that had once held pools of flame. A place of your people, we were always told.” She sounded almost ashamed when she concluded, “We worshipped you there.”
This was more than I had ever heard of Mother Argai’s life before the Blades in the entire time I’d known her.
“But we were gone,” said Firesetter mournfully.
“From that place, yes. Gone, but not forgotten.”
I watched the two of them, wondering if somehow this connection they shared could bind Firesetter to our cause. His Fantail, I thought, wanted to join us.
It was enough to drop this for now. She would seek to convince him. All I could do was push in a way that likely harmed my chances of securing what I wished.
“We should go home,” I told Mother Argai.
She drained her wretched beer and set the wooden bowl on the table. I could not face my own drink with its skunky taste, and so left it behind as we rose.
“Good evening to you both,” I said. “If your minds change, send word.”
“How shall we do that?” asked Fantail.
“A letter to Mother Argai at the Temple of the Silver Lily. Though it would be best to remain discreet in anything you write.”
Mother Argai nodded her agreement. “Do what she has said. I check there several times in every week.”
“Farewell,” said Fantail. Firesetter rumbled some vague agreement.
We turned toward the door and our faces to the world. I was disappointed, but not bitterly so. These two were not done with us, nor were we with them.
As I touched the handle, the door banged open from outside. Three big men shouldered in. The last glanced up at me, his mouth forming words when he stopped. Then: “You!”
They all three drew knives and had me hedged with blades in that moment. Mother Argai dropped back and pulled her own weapons, but I was trapped. Points pressed into my leathers at my gut and my chest.
“Hello,” I said. “Street Guild, come
for a drink after a hard day of duty?”
* * *
They backed me into the wall by the door. Mother Argai hovered behind them, frustrated in her attack by my helplessness. The barkeep swept up her cashbox and disappeared through a door at the back of the room. Most of the few customers followed her.
Firesetter and Fantail did not do so, I noted.
“Back away, woman,” growled one of the Guildsmen to Mother Argai. “This is not being your fight.”
“Any Blade is every Blade,” I said pleasantly.
“But we knows you ain’t no Blade,” one of my other attackers said. “You been read out.”
I could attack them at any moment, and they knew it, too. But with three knives pressed into me, whatever effort I made would impale me on their points. By the same token, they could not compel me to much, because once they moved me out of this position, I would be very difficult to contain.
“You have only two choices here, lads.” I let my face bloom into a smile that was hopefully worrisome to them. “Let me go, or kill me where I stand.”
“Killing you wouldn’t be the worst thing,” muttered their apparent leader. He’d obviously come to the same realization I had. There were not enough of them. It took three to contain me like this. If they sent one for allies, Mother Argai and I would best the other two. Or we could just all stand here until someone’s bladder drove them to desperation.
“No, not the worst thing,” I agreed, and marked him for special punishment. “But not the best, either. Instead, why don’t you take a message back to your masters, for that bitch Surali?”
His face scrunched with thought. Neither of his fellows looked any swifter of intellect. “Walk away?”
“Walk away with my message,” I said patiently. “Carry word back that you have met the fearsome monster Green, and she has a bargain to offer the Bittern Court.”
“What is it?”
“Give me back the hostages, and I will grant Surali what she wants most.” Even I did not know what that would be, other than my head on a spear, but I wanted to get out of this situation intact. Besides which, it would be worth the trouble if she did respond. Talking rather than fighting was always a good sign. A lesson I’d come to late, but was learning to appreciate.
“You don’t—” He was interrupted by the door banging open again.
All three of them glanced to their left. Two of the knifepoints wavered, weapons following the eye as I had been drilled so thoroughly by Mother Vajpai and my other training Mothers.
Mother Argai was already in motion. Me no less. I tried to slide around the last knife rather than onto it, but the point caught my leathers and scored the side of my chest. Even as that wound bloomed pain like fire, my knee caught the silent one of the three in the groin. Mother Argai’s knives took the thinker in the kidneys from behind. The third turned with a look of triumph already dying on his face and dragged his knife back across my fresh wound.
I gave him a faceful of my own knife, then slumped against the wall. Mother Argai had already turned toward the four new men who’d come in. They drew their weapons with a speed that spoke of training.
More Street Guildsmen, fellows of these three we’d just dealt with.
Pushing off from the wall, I followed Mother Argai to meet their steel with mine.
Two on four was not improbable odds, but the Street Guild had trained to fight the Blades. Some among them had studied us with care. They knew at least certain of the tricks of our fighting style.
That meant I found my first three or four thrusts blocked. Mother Argai had scored a touch, but her man was not down yet. We were fighting in an open doorway. People in the street would hear. More would come soon. And we had no maneuvering room or reserves of our own.
What I needed most was not to beat these men down, but to get away before more arrived to block my escape. Otherwise I risked capture. At this point, that might be worse than death.
“The back door!” I shouted in Petraean, slashing at one of these four. They were bunched up together as well, or they would have been more dangerous to us.
“At the count of three,” she called back.
Then an enormous red fist whistled past me and simply shattered the skull of the man I was fighting closest. He collapsed with his face in a pulp.
A knife tip scored my forearm through my leathers as I turned to the next Street Guildsman. Firesetter reached in and grabbed that fellow’s weapon hand with the blade still in it. His much larger fingers closed over with crushing strength, judging by the man’s screaming. The Red Man yanked and my opponent stumbled forward to fall full length on the floor.
The other two retreated hastily up the stairs. Already I could hear shouting outside. “Let’s go,” I snapped, still in Petraean.
Mother Argai led us out the rear door, deeper into these cellars but farther away from the street entrance and the panicked violence surely building outside. Firesetter and Fantail followed.
* * *
A few minutes later we sheltered in the loft of another stable. I would rather have taken my rest in the Poppet Dancers’ ox-house, amid the memory of Endurance and perhaps some of the god’s favor, but our swiftest path had not led that way. Or perhaps Firesetter meant to protect his own. Six or seven shivering mules huddled below in the farthest corner from us. They were too frightened even to bray, and besides Fantail had silenced them with a touch and whisper as we’d arrived in this shelter.
Firesetter was shivering, too. I worried for the straw in which we all crouched. Shouts in the street continued. I was very glad that Kalimpura did not have a city watch. The Street Guild would come in more force, and soon, but this was not the part of the city where their sway was strongest. They would have trouble sweeping freely from house to house and building to building as they might have done down along the waterfront.
Not for the first time, I wished this city had a decent Below. We could have made our escape good long since.
“Why were those fools coming here to drink?” I wondered aloud, though my voice was still a whisper.
“Surely avoiding their serjeant,” said Mother Argai.
Well, that made sense. To a point. As we had gone there because the place was cheap and anonymous. Those qualities were attractive to many people besides us.
Still, I wondered if more was afoot. “I wish I knew if that Mafic had arrived in port yet,” I muttered.
“Mafic?” asked Fantail over Firesetter’s rising rumble.
I smelled smoke for real now. That was serious business around stables and straw. “Make him stop!” I hissed. “Or we’ll be burned out of here.”
She touched the Red Man. “Mafic,” he said. It was like listening to a building speak.
Now was definitely not the time for this, but I had to understand more. “You know him?”
The words came from very far away. “He was my fa— trainer.”
“He is here, or will be soon,” I said. “Pursuing me in the matter of the death of the Saffron Tower’s twins.” And possibly them as well, though they did not need to hear that from me. These two understood who and what they were far better than anything I might say to them.
“You … fight … Mafic.…” The burning smell was distinct. One of the mules finally brayed even through whatever glamour Firesetter had placed upon them.
“Yes. And I’m about to fight a fire if you don’t stop this!”
As if called by me, open flames began to dance around him, lighting the straw dust in his hair and rendering Firesetter’s face into that of a true coal demon. “Mafic!” he roared.
The mules screamed and bolted. Fire erupted all about the Red Man. I cursed and jumped down out of the loft. Landing hard on the wooden floor below, I realized a moment later that no one had jumped after me.
That was alarming.
I looked back up. Sparks already flew in the air, straw crackling as it burned. Fires were vile things to be inside a building with, and I knew full well what could
happen to blaze in a stable or a granary.
“Get down here!” I shouted.
Mother Argai peered over the edge of the loft. “We cannot move him.”
The obvious did not occur to me. We all nearly died because I did not stop to think. All I could encompass right then was to wonder whether Firesetter had no sense of self-preservation.
Scrambling back up the ladder, I found myself in choking smoke. Outside, someone was already ringing a bell and shouting frantically. There would be buckets of water and tense, angry men here very soon. If we were thought to have set the fire, it wouldn’t matter what the Street Guild wanted with me. The local residents would beat us to death.
Firesetter lay on the loft floor, curled in a protective ball. A gigantic protective ball, but the position was so similar to one my babies sometimes adopted that my heart surged. Mother Argai crouched beside him. Her eyes flickered with desperation. Fantail had her hands on his arms, and seemed to be pouring water onto him from nowhere at all. Out of the air? How?
Much more to the focus of my attention, flames raced through the straw and licked at the posts supporting the stable’s ceiling.
“We go now,” I growled.
He rolled over and blinked at me. Those eyes seemed as bright a red as if the flames had originated from within. “No.” Firesetter’s voice was a collapsing wall.
Fantail looked up at me, and oddly, she seemed more exasperated than desperate. I was surprised. “You need to leave,” she said.
The hissing and cracking of the flame were becoming louder. Outside, someone shouted again. How had they known so soon?
The mules, I recalled. Someone must have seen them bolt and spotted the glow within.
I grabbed Mother Argai’s arm and wrenched her toward the edge. She did not want to come with me, still held by that strange fascination she’d evidenced with the Red Man.
“It won’t matter for us if we wait another minute longer!” I shouted in her ear. “Nothing will. These two can take care of themselves.”
She didn’t believe that, and neither did I, but we did share a sense of self-preservation, and so we jumped. This time the floorboards cracked beneath us, raising a cloud of dust. The sparks drifting down had set piled hay and straw to smoldering.
