“So folks have said.”
Mara stood still as a shoreside Penitent or a bowsprit maid. Then she shook her head, smile softer now and wistful sad, and walked away.
Kai sagged into her cane, but tensed again when Mara spoke behind her. “Get better. And be careful.”
“I’ll try.” She listened to the wind and to Mara’s receding footsteps. When only wind remained, she walked three-legged to the balcony’s edge. The cable car descended the slopes below. Through its window she saw a flash of blue dress.
6
Izza tended Cat for three weeks. The woman slept for the first night and day, shaking and sweating in her nightmares. When she woke, she propped herself against a broken crate and drank water by the gallon. The only food she could bear was the blandest gruel, which was fine because that was all Izza could afford to bring her.
The next day Cat opened her eyes, and this time they focused, dancing around the room to settle on Izza. “I know you. Thank you for helping me.” Her voice had rough edges and a New World Kathic accent, all rhotic r’s and dropped g’s.
“Don’t get used to it,” Izza said.
“I’m not.” She reached for her pocket, and found a coin there. Izza had searched her, but hadn’t robbed her yet. Cat sank soulstuff into the coin, and flicked the coin to Izza, who plucked it out of the air. The woman’s soul burned going down. As it dissolved Izza felt Cat’s suspicion, and her hunger.
Izza knew hunger. “For saving your life?”
“For food,” Cat said. “Can I stay here awhile?”
“What’s awhile?”
“A few weeks. Maybe a month, worse case two. I need a quiet place to lie low. Then I’ll move on. It’s okay if you say no.”
“How do you know I won’t kill you while you sleep?”
“Have you tried?”
Izza crouched out of Cat’s reach, and watched her. Being watched bothered some people. Cat wasn’t one of them.
“What do you want?” Cat asked. “I can’t offer much. I don’t have any more soulstuff than what you’ve seen, and I won’t go into debt for you or anyone.”
Every cradle story Izza knew cautioned against pressing the issue of payment: travelers could be gods in disguise, or demons, waiting to avenge a breach of hospitality. Izza didn’t want much, but she didn’t know what a woman who fought Penitents singlehanded could offer. “I want off this island.”
“What’s keeping you here?”
“Only the ocean.”
“I can take you with me,” Cat said, but her voice failed and she had to breathe deep and gulp more water before she could continue. “I can take you with me when I go.”
“Stay then,” Izza said. “Until you’re well.”
The woman lowered her head and slept. As she slept, she began again to shake.
Izza knew the shakes, the patterns of withdrawal. She was ready with a stolen bucket and a mop on the third day, when it turned bad. Cat threw up into the bucket, twice, and gritted her teeth. She convulsed, swatted at hallucinations, and sometimes babbled in a language that sounded more like grinding rock than a human voice. But the next night she slept, if not easy, then easier.
Cat became part of Izza’s routine. She used the woman’s soulstuff to buy them food, and stole to supplement. Begged in West Claw, a little, when the Lunar New Year came and tourists danced mad dances and soul flowed like water.
Izza only regretted her decision to care for Cat when the children came back. One evening she returned to the warehouse and found Ellen and Ivy and a boy she didn’t recognize seated in a triangle around Cat, asking questions. The kids looked ragged, and Izza could smell the boy beneath and through the warehouse rot. “Did the Blue Lady send you?” Ivy asked, and Cat looked at her, blank eyed, confused.
“No,” Izza said from behind them both. Ivy’s head darted around, and she stared at Izza, expectant first, then sad when she didn’t find what she sought. “What are you doing here? I told you the game was over. I told you to get gone.”
“We want a story,” Ellen said.
She sank to her knees, so their heads were level. “No more stories. Come on. You want to waste time with this stuff? You have a life to worry about.” The boy didn’t look her in the eye. She didn’t wonder what had happened to him.
“Who’s she?” Ellen pointed to Cat.
“She’s sick.”
“Is she going to help the Blue Lady?”
“No one can help the Blue Lady,” Izza said. “Not now.”
Ivy sat, and crossed her legs. Izza returned her stare.
“I’m not leaving,” Ivy said, “without a story.”
So she told them a story. Gods help her, she told them a story, an old one about the Blue Lady saving a girl caught by Smiling Jack’s dead boys. They listened, the three kids, and Cat, too. Izza kept waiting for the woman to interrupt, but she said nothing until the story finished and the kids nodded and left, padding softly over the warehouse floor. “Don’t let me catch you back here,” Izza called after them, but they did not seem to hear.
Once the kids were gone, she offered Cat a meal of rice and mangoes and something pretending to be pork, which she’d bought off a food cart down by the docks where meals came cheap. Cat ate in silence. Some of her color had returned, and yesterday Izza’d caught her doing push-ups one-handed beside her bedroll.
“You tell good stories,” Cat said when the food was done.
“Too good,” she said.
“Who’s the Blue Lady?”
Izza did not answer.
“Okay,” Cat said. “Why did you chase them off?”
“They need me.”
“People need each other sometimes. Nothing wrong with that.”
“I won’t be around forever.”
Cat laughed, but the laugh stopped when Izza looked at her. Not that Izza’d put any special malice into her eyes. She just looked, like normal. “You’re young to say things like that and mean them.”
“I’m leaving, aren’t I? Soon as you’re well.”
“Why?”
Izza stood and paced, waiting for Cat to change her question. She did not. At last Izza stopped, returned, and sat again. “They don’t put kids in the Penitents, okay?”
“Okay.” Cat set the bamboo box aside. “You’re scared.”
“We’re not all made of silver. We can’t all fight those things off.”
“You have to run,” she said, “and you don’t want them to be lost without you.”
“Yes.”
“Sometimes people have to work together, though.”
“That why you left your god?”
Cat said nothing.
“I see the withdrawal. And I saw you fight the Penitents. A god made you. And you left him.”
“I wasn’t made,” she said at last. “Not any different from you at least.”
“But you had a god.”
“A goddess. Yes. I worked for one, back onshore. Guess you could say we’re separated now.” She smiled briefly, after that, a pained kind of smile.
“What happened?”
“You know how I said people have to work together?”
“Yeah?”
“Sometimes the best way to work together is to be apart for a while.”
Izza didn’t understand, but she knew better than to ask questions. If Cat wanted her to know what she meant, she would have spoken plainly.
One night, Izza came to the warehouse and found Cat gone, the wad of dirty linens where she’d slept folded into a neat square. Not even footprints remained. Izza set down the box of rice and fruit she’d brought and searched the warehouse, even the little chapel hidden behind the debris, searched the docks beneath and the road outside. Nothing. Cat had vanished, quick as she came, and left her here.
She sank down beside the boxed rice, crossed her legs and hugged her knees, and stared over the horizon of her arms. Steam twisted out from under the box lid, rose a few inches, faded into air.
Of course.
Cat needed food, and rest, time to recover. She hadn’t ever meant to bring Izza along. Who would? Made as much sense as Izza bringing Ivy or Ellen. Or Nick or Vel or Seth or Cassie or Jet. Or any of the others.
Sunset purpled the sky. A single star gleamed through a gap in the roof. She didn’t know the star’s name. Her mother would have. Her mother was gone.
She remembered a song, and wished she hadn’t.
Her jaw clamped and her arms tensed and her nails bit into her wrists and forearms. She would have stood and kicked the box across the warehouse, but she didn’t want to waste the rice.
She stared instead into the steam and imagined fingers around a throat, and didn’t know whose throat or whose fingers. A Penitent patrol marched by outside in thunderous array. She did not flinch. They passed. Even their echoes failed.
“Hey,” Cat said a few minutes later. “Sorry I’m late.”
Izza twitched to her feet, whole body taut at once. Her eyes were used to the dark by now. The mainland woman stood by the hole in the warehouse wall. Must have crept in while Izza wasn’t looking. Stupid. Distracted, feeling sorry for herself.
She tried to look calm, but still she took a step back as Cat neared. The woman’s limp was better, not yet healed. She moved slowly over rubble, into and out of light.
“I thought you left,” she said.
“I went for a walk, got lost in the warrens. Too many side streets. I need you to help me make a map.”
“I thought,” she repeated.
“I’m here now.” Cat spoke slowly, hands out. “I just took a walk, that’s all. Trust me. When it’s time to leave, you’ll know. You’ll be ready. Okay?”
“I brought you rice.”
“Thanks,” Cat said, and sat, and ate.
The next day, Izza stole a purse and did not sell it: kept it, rather, on the altar in the hidden warehouse chapel, under the gaze of dead gods. The day after that, she stole two, and the next two more. Building a little storehouse for the kids, tribute to whatever new gods they might find after she was gone.
She’d leave them ready. But she’d leave all the same.
7
Kai woke to find a folded letter on her sickroom sheets, parchment marked in spindly writing that faded as she read: “My office, one hour. —J.” Economical. She placed the paper, folded again, on her bedside table, stood with aid of cane, and staggered to the bathroom. Sleep gummed her mind and body. At least Jace didn’t come to her by nightmare. Her dreams the last few weeks had been dark and drowning.
Mara and Gavin had enlivened the bathroom with a few touches from Kai’s house, but purple duck-shaped soaps and green towels did not soften the sterile white and chrome. Her hospital gown husk lay discarded on gray tile. Too-bright ghostlights reflected off her skin and off the mirror to her eyes: a worn, ill-used body made of meat, webbed with old and new scars. The bite wound on her shoulder looked like the angry outline of a blinded eye. More scars on her back, from the idol, as if she’d once had wings and someone sawed them free. They’d cut her hair short to operate, the clipped black fuzz grown out since to something like a pageboy cut. Mapping her scars, she imagined her next trip to the beach, once she’d healed.
What happened to you? the boys and girls would say.
Myself, she thought, and showered, and gritted teeth rather than accept the pain.
* * *
When Kai reached Jace’s office he was in a meeting. She waited in the leather-cushioned foyer, paging through a two-week-old copy of The Thaumaturgist (garish lede: The Helmsman’s Mistake, with accompanying full-color cartoon of an embarrassed Shining Empire theocrat draped in the kind of quilted robes no Imperial official had worn for two hundred years). Someone had left the door ajar, and she paid more attention to the argument within than to her article.
“Other members of the island council appreciate the merits of our proposal.” She recognized the Iskari accent, nasal on vowels and heavy on consonants.
“Other members of the council,” and that was Jace, “are more concerned with real estate profits and construction contracts than with theological security. That’s where I come in.”
“No one’s proposing missionaries. We want a cathedral for our own merchants and diplomats to worship. The Communion of Iskari Faith will pay for construction, and land.”
“I’d be more interested in your proposal, Legate, if your gods didn’t have a way of wriggling into people’s heads.”
“The Old Lords do not corrupt. They call, and those blessed to hear decide whether to answer. I expected more than slurs from you, High Priest.”
Jace’s secretary cleared her throat; Kai was no longer even pretending to read. She returned her attention to the magazine, and tried to look as if she weren’t listening. “Kavekana is neutral,” Jace said, leaning into that last word. “We don’t allow Craft firms to own land here, either. Even shipping Concerns rent their piers.”
“A formality. Craftsmen’s crystal spires stand three miles outside the harbor’s mouth.”
“And the nearest Iskari military base is fifteen minutes away on dragonback.”
“That’s hardly the same thing.”
“Rent an office in the Palm, like everyone else. Or buy a skyspire suite. My duty’s to keep this island safe until our gods return, and to protect our idols in the meantime. I won’t risk exposure to mainland proselytizing.” Jace checked his volume; his next words were so quiet she barely heard them: “I’m sorry, but it is what it is.”
Kai couldn’t make out the cleric’s answer, if one came. She browsed business news until the Iskari legate swept out of the office, his purple robe trailing over stone. Gems glinted from the eyes of the squid god stitched into the robe’s back. An attaché jogged after him, suited, holding a briefcase. Kai felt a pang of sympathy, watching the attaché go. Hell of a job. Sometimes literally.
She leaned onto her cane, pressed herself up, straightened her jacket and shirtfront, and stepped into Jace’s office, closing the door behind her.
The High Priest’s chambers stared south from the volcano summit over a more elevated version of the view from Kai’s balcony: the slopes of Kavekana’ai, the city, East and West Claw pinching the harbor between them. The window was not made from glass, but rock transmuted transparent.
The office was almost empty. Upon his accession to the post, Jace had spent a week moving out his predecessor’s junk. High Priests clung to life a long time, and most accumulated office mess like moss. Much of the cleanup was standard shred-or-store, but Jace’s predecessor left arcane knickknacks in drawers and cabinets and trophy cases. An onyx statue of a beetle, when touched, came to life and began carving the mountain’s stone into new beetles, who copied themselves in turn. A stack of papers in one corner had proved impossibly dense: seven hirelings strained to lift a single sheet. The papers had to be burned in place, and the resulting stink—of burnt hair and melted flesh and not of paper at all—lingered in the volcano’s executive levels for a week.
After all that trouble, Jace kept his chambers spare. No furniture save for the magisterium wood desk, the leather chair he rarely used, and a small glass table. Four statues flanked the room, old Kavekana make, gem eyed and flat featured. No books. No pictures. Nothing to shield him from the demands of the job. Nothing to shield the job from him.
The chair was empty, the desk polished. Jace himself paced behind both, swift-moving silhouette against and above the island. He kept trim despite his desk job. Age showed only as frost in his short hair. She let the door close behind her; a pressurized arm guided it to soft rest in the jamb.
“Tough talk,” she said.
He pressed his fingers together in front of his chest as he turned. “Gods spare me from priests. The Iskari have lobbied two decades for their cathedral and every year they get closer, no matter how many times I tell the council their gods’ presence would warp our idols beyond repair. And the Iskari aren’t the worst, either. You should see my inbox. Alt Coulumb keeps petitioning
us to return a bit of their goddess they say we have. Same claim as all the others: back in the God Wars someone stole from them and stored it here. Their gargoyles ship us these big slabs of granite carved with their demands. Return the shards of Seril. I wish someone’d tell them paper was cheaper.” He laughed. “I’m sorry. I love my job. How are you?”
“Ready for work,” she said.
“What work?”
So that was the game. Since he wasn’t sitting behind his desk, Kai saw no reason to stand in front of it. She joined him by the window and watched him oscillate, toward her, then away. “Building idols. Structuring trades. Solving problems. Your doctors have kept me prone as a roasting turkey for a month, and if you had your way they’d probably truss me like one. I’m ready to do my job.”
“This isn’t a job. It’s a calling.” He reached the apex of his round, and stopped, half in shadow and half out. “You’re feeling well?”
“I am.”
“You can walk without the cane?”
She tapped the bamboo against the floor. “Not for long. Physical therapy is slow.”
“You haven’t cooperated, I hear.”
“It’s hard to take seriously.”
“You could have died. You almost died on the operating table, and before.”
“I almost saved her.”
“Saving her wasn’t your job.”
“This isn’t a job. It’s a calling.”
“You plan to snap back at me. In this conversation.”
“If you had good news, you would have told me; if you wanted to commend me, you would have. You owe me straight talk, Jace. Don’t walk me through it like I’m some slave you’re trying to teach math.”
“I don’t think you’re a slave.” His voice softened, and he approached her. His fingers trailed over the varnished surface of his desk. Easy to forget that he was a father, a lover, a leader. Easy to forget he was anything but a master. “I think you’re dangerous.”
“This is about Kevarian. And the Grimwalds.”
“Of course.”
“They won’t win. We acted in their best interests, all the way through—Shining Empire debt looked like a safe investment, especially with the People’s Congress coming up. No one expected the Helmsman to try to open the soul exchange over his own cabinet’s heads. And we—I—went above and beyond to save their idol. I almost did.”
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