by Jay Lake
He must have heard my desire in my tone, for the bluff was gone from his voice when he answered. “Then she will be lucky if she dies quickly. An avatar of Blackblood has slipped our nooses and gone hunting.”
That sounded horrifying. “What happens when it finds its prey?”
“Eventually it returns to the god.”
“Break the Wheel!” I cursed. “How do we rescue her?”
His answer was chillingly simple. “We don’t.” Then: “Green. You do not sound well. Let us find a quiet place and talk about what it is that may be done.”
“Qu-quiet, yes.” I managed to put my knife away without stabbing my thigh. I very badly wanted to sit down, in safety.
She was gone. My greatest teacher was gone. A sick emptiness took everything good and right within me as I followed close behind this priest who might once have been my friend.
I kept enough sense of direction, even in my upset, to know that we were heading for the Temple Quarter. Goddess, protect me from Your sisters and brothers here.
Septio led me slowly to a colony of coldfire, for I could not walk fast. This time we both took plentiful swaths in hand. Somewhere in the darkness, we’d left behind the mine gallery with its corroded, bulking machines. Now the gleaming silver light showed a wealth of carvings. Faces and forms crowded the stone from the floor all the way up to and across the ceiling. The details of their features were wrapped in soft shadow, melting and flowing as we walked. Gnomons, for the dark-bound sundial of the underworld.
I let them distract me from the cracked well of my grief.
The Blood Fountain had originally been built much the same way. Kalimpura had entire temples in a similar style, buildings where every exposed face had been carved in a frenzied riot of detail.
I could not see why such a great effort would be made to line a tunnel few knew the existence of.
Eventually we found a tall, cold room lit by spitting gas lamps. Though it was at the level of the tunnel, the gas told me we were in the undercellar of some building of the Temple Quarter. How deep did the clever architecture go?
I found myself focusing on the smallest details as a distraction from my grief. This room had eight sides of equal length, making the floor an even octagon about twelve feet across. The corners where the sides met were relieved with little projections that rose the thirty feet to the ceiling to form a blunted vault. The walls were rimed with frost, as was the floor. A sigil was etched in marble beneath the frost.
Each wall held a doorway of blank stone. We had entered through the only opening. Septio stepped to the middle of the room. “Join me.”
I did so. He shut his eyes, so I shut mine. I had the sudden sense of something larger and meaty close by us, though it did not have the blind, questing hunger of the skinned thing that had taken the Dancing Mistress. I clenched my fists and stood firm beside the priest, unready to surrender anything more.
His arm brushed mine. “Come.”
The doors had moved. Stone blocked the path where our footprints disturbed the frost on the floor, and the opening now beckoned over virgin rime.
“Dread magic,” I asked, “or a slowly rotating floor?”
Septio gave me a sour look. “Follow where the road leads, Green.”
“I have spent too much time in a temple, and among practical women.” The Dancing Mistress had been one, of course. The greatest of them. My eyes stung with the thought of her.
We passed through the darkness into a room almost as tall as the octagonal chamber, but longer, and thus relatively more narrow in aspect. This one was ranked by stands of dark candles, some deep brown beeswax. As we entered, the tapers flared to life to form a wave of light that reached the far end of the room and bloomed off the hammered silver mirror on that wall. The floor was littered with rugs and cushions and bolsters. A low table holding a few trays and bowls sat at the middle of the room amid the brightest candles.
“Come,” said Septio. “Sit. Let us talk in a safe and peaceful place.”
I watched the mirror as we moved to the center of the room. The reflection was delayed slightly, the way an echo might dally to follow after a noise. I had never known light to do that, and wondered what glamer was on the mirror. Or possibly on me.
“Below has not been good to me lately,” I said as I sat beside the table. Something among the bowls had an interesting aroma. My body, starved for blood, began to hunger for it. I felt guilt at the hunger, as if my need were a betrayal of my lost mistress.
Septio tucked himself down next to me, not touching but still quite close, and reached for one of the bowls. “Try this.”
“How will it help me find her?” I demanded. Or her corpse.
“Trust me in this. You need your strength, and we have time.”
I did not trust him, but neither did I have much choice. Finely shredded meat in a very dark sauce. I lifted some with my fingers and tasted. Salty and rich, with a jolt of spice I would not have thought to find in Stone Coast cooking.
It was a balm to my thinned blood.
Dropping my veil, I began to eat. It was difficult not to make noises as I tore into the food. I felt like a beggar outside a bakery, driven half-mad by the scent and stuffing myself on the scraps before someone took the tray away.
After a few minutes, I slowed myself. There was no reason to lose control in front of this man, even if I did half-count him as a friend. “Now I have trusted you. Tell me, where is she?”
“I told you. With the avatar.”
“And you said rescue was not possible for me. It happens I believe you, or I’d already be destroying this room looking for the way out to find her.” An empty boast, though sitting in a decent amount of warmth and safety was doing much to restore me from the assault. “You led me to believe there might be other paths.” I leaned so close that the warmth of his face mingled with mine. “Tell me now,” I growled.
“That depends upon the god’s aspect.” Septio’s voice was low to match mine. “Skinless is not a theopomp, so it will not lay her directly before the altar. She will be held awhile.”
“Safely, or in pain and fear?”
“Green, what sort of god do we follow here?”
I exploded. “ Why? Why do you honor such a cheap storybook villain? Life is difficult enough without mortifying yourself before a monster!”
“Do you know what we do here? Do you know why?”
“No,” I admitted.
“Then do not criticize. The Sundering of Heaven was a stroke that has echoed across all of the world’s time.”
“You refer to theogenic dispersion.” Sundering of Heaven. I despised his cant. The Temple of the Silver Lily seemed to have managed largely without the mummery so often associated with priests and gods. Simple description had been enough.
“Yes.” Septio was surprised. “It is easier to talk of sundering, for most people.”
I grabbed a lock of his brown, curling hair and yanked him close. “I am not most people. I will grant you that your god is a liver-eater worthy of your respect. Grant me that I know something of what I am doing.”
“You have changed much during your time away, Girl,” he breathed, then kissed me.
For one shocked moment I sat with his lips upon mine. Though he was clean-shaven, his face bristled. His presence was an electrick prickle on me.
Then I came to myself, pulled back, and landed an open-handed blow upon Septio’s cheek. “I am not your harlot!” I shouted.
A long silence followed, which almost tilted into something more. Or less.
“Now where is she?”
“W-we must see the Pater Primus ab-bout the Dancing Mistress,” he finally said. “But I would know some things first.”
“Will she be broken or consumed?”
“N-not until the theopomp takes her up.”
“Who is the theopomp?”
His smile was crooked and bloody. “I am.”
“You bastard,” I hissed in Seliu.
“N
-no, no.” His hands fluttered like birds to draw a hawk from their nestlings. “There is a labyrinth. The avatar will be a while passing through it. I can do nothing until it emerges. With luck, she will not recall the journey.”
“Why the focus on pain?” I asked again, distracted.
He sat up and dabbed at his face with a length of damask strewn on the floor. “You follow a southern god, yes?”
“Goddess.”
“A women’s temple?”
“Yes.” I wondered where he was bound with this. I did not want him so close to the Lily Goddess, even with mere words. Not if there truly had been god-killers in this city sometime in the recent past.
“Does she take up the pain of birth? Of illness, or the death of a mother? The death of a child?”
“Well…” I had always supposed She must, but we never celebrated pain there except in the special way the Blades sometimes had of sharing love and hurt in the same moments. “Hopes and fears, yes.”
“Your pain is as powerful as any prayer. Likewise the cripple, or the child who tumbles down a staircase, or a draft horse with a broken leg and the man with the sledgehammer not there yet to end it.” He gasped, his breath shuddering. “Blackblood takes that in, along with the death cries of the prey in the field and the sheep in the pen, and much else that washes the world. My god’s mercies are extreme, but they are mercies nonetheless.”
“So death is his demesne?”
“No, not death. There are dust-dry temples tended by men wrapped in yards and yards of yellowing cloth who offer homage to what passes on the other side of life. Suffering is of this world. Death is of the next.”
“They are almost the same,” I protested.
“You have the right of it. Sometimes they are almost the same.” His smile was sickening. “We celebrate pain as a way of celebrating life. When you can no longer feel the scourge, you are beyond this world.”
I shook my head. “I suppose there is someone like him in Kalimpura, but I never passed within temples other than my own.” These priests are crazed, I thought. Like one who lusts for the pain of the lash so much, she hurts and kills to feel it.
“Gods are rarely pleasant. Even the smiling queens of the harvest have the blood of a murdered king somewhere beneath the soil of their fields.”
“We still possess a measure of grace.”
“That is why men are greater than gods.” Something in his voice caught at me. “We can know grace, and knowing grace, pass beyond. Even the gods themselves are not blessed with souls. When they die, it is forever.”
“Neither is the Dancing Mistress so blessed.” Though her people’s paths mingled far beyond their lives. That gave me a trace of hope.
“No. Which is why I have not been so worried.” He sighed. “She called you back from wherever you fled, did she not?”
Ah, to business. Finally. “To work against the bandit Choybalsan.”
“I believe I understand her intent, though the details of her plan have not been made known to me.”
“Whatever the plan was, it has failed.” I stood and stretched. My body ached abominably. “I see nothing here, know nothing.”
“That is because you are not looking at this problem through the correct lens.” Septio’s smile was small and tight. “The trouble belongs to the gods.”
“I broke the Duke with my words. The power came from the path of the Dancing Mistress’ people. Not human magic or the dreams of goddesses.”
“You misunderstand me. Choybalsan is not a bandit chieftain coming with a thousand spears at his back. He is a god rising from the stones of the inland hills. The villages and steadings lost? Most are not burned. They join him.”
“Why?”
“Because he is something other than this city. Copper Downs levies taxes, buys low, sells dear, and seduces away the children of the country for leagues about in all directions. What do the highland chiefs and headmen get for their trouble? Their life is like that of a flea which rides a dog. Choybalsan gives them power where they have had none since time out of memory.”
He leaned close. “That magic of the Duke’s. If you can channel it back, we can help the silent gods find their voices. Blackblood spawns avatars because the god himself is half aware. Likewise many of the other powers of this city. Those that have come to themselves scheme unseemly and poach on the rights and privileges of those who yet lie insensate.”
So we came to the crux. He wanted his god empowered so the death gods and the hunting gods and whoever else from the divine squabble didn’t make away piecemeal with Blackblood’s supply of fear and pain.
The gods were like children fighting over cake.
Was this what the Lily Goddess had feared? An infection of pettiness? More likely the rising godhead of Choybalsan. If new gods of soil and stone could rise here, they could rise anywhere. Would some peasant cult from the distant rice paddies and mango plantations take Kalimpura by storm?
No wonder so many people despised the tulpas. They were afraid.
I realized I’d missed part of what Septio was saying. “… the Pater Primus. I think you must do it this way.”
“I will have the Dancing Mistress back before I decide anything. Then I will speak with the Interim Council.” I wanted very much to be quit of this city, but that was not a choice I could make. Not yet, before I could tell the Lily Temple something worthwhile. Or sail west until I became a beggar at some distant dock, well away from the affairs of thrones and temples. I pushed the thought aside. “There has been little of the Duke’s magic here in Copper Downs, so we will go hunting Choybalsan. Under whose banner I do not care, for my sword will be my own.”
That was a lie of sorts. Though I was on an errand for a goddess myself, I knew which banner I preferred. Kalimpura, wicked as it could be, lived in peace beneath the rule of dozens of smaller powers. The temples there were only a part of the balance. What Septio argued here was for placing the temples at the heart of the matter. More to the point, his temple.
I could not see how elevating the priests of a pain god to the seats of power was to anyone’s good.
“Come,” he said.
I let Septio take my hand and lead me toward the strange mirror. Once more, where I might have expected god magic, it was only a door-albeit a peculiar one. Beyond was a wooden staircase that folded around a shaft. The distant banging of gongs echoed.
Septio smiled at me in the dim light. I could see his teeth gleam. “We are timely.”
Blackblood’s sanctuary was nothing of what I might have expected from a pain god. Of a familiar formal design, it could have been any official building in Copper Downs. Pillars of black marble supported a vaulted ceiling on which the stars of some night sky foreign to the Stone Coast had been set in gleaming silver. Dark, narrow banners hung down in shadowed strips, much as they had in the palace. Low galleries behind each rank of pillars left and right hosted a series of stone couches, which might have been funerary platforms in a death house. Narrow curtained windows within the side galleries let in some light- when had it become morning outside? I wondered in a brief burst of worried fear-while gas lamps attached to the pillars hissed with the brightest fire. A pool between the pillars quivered like mud but showed a strange, malleable silver. The sanctuary smelled not of grave dust or funeral herbs, but mostly of the vinegar someone had recently used to clean the floors.
Neither altar nor throne stood at the far end, just a cluster of men in dark robes with cowls drawn up around their faces. Bareheaded young aspirants-in a brief moment of distraction, I wondered if they were so called here-circled the priests, banging gongs, shaking bells, and casting powders into the air.
More mummery, of the sort that irked me so. I checked the seating of my veil and trailed Septio toward his fellow priests.
One looked up at our approach. He lifted a hand. The leaping racket of the aspirants halted between one breath and the next, except for the faint ringing of the settling gongs. The other priests turned to stare.
They all wore masks woven from thin strips of leather, which covered their faces in ridges running from side to side. Again, mummery, but I had to admire the theater guising. At any distance, the robes would seem empty of all but shadows.
We worshipped the Lily Goddess bareheaded and barefaced, but perhaps these men felt a need to hide from their god. I knew I would if Blackblood had been my patron.
Septio stepped into their circle. He made a bow, which courtesy was returned by a series of nods from the masked priests. I tilted my own chin, which courtesy was returned not at all.
A lesser silver pool was set into the floor at their feet. This one shivered as the great one in the center of the hall had-except where it had been a strangely liquid silver showing nothing, an image was visible in this pool.
The god magic I had been expecting. I looked.
Skinless stood on cobbled stone before a whirling cloud of white dust. The Dancing Mistress lay curled on the ground beside it. I realized when I looked at her that the stones were flags, not cobbles. Skinless was very large.
The avatar seemed hesitant as well. Frightened, even.
I looked more closely at the dust. Or sand, perhaps, for it seemed I could spy coarseness. “What is it?” I asked quietly. “Salt?”
Septio made a small noise in his throat. “Yes.”
“Why would the avatar of a pain god fear pain? Especially when his own priests embrace it?”
“Pain is still pain.” Septio looked around at his fellow priests, then said something I did not follow. Their temple language, I assumed.
The one who had first acknowledged our coming nodded. Septio switched back to Petraean. “I must go bring the avatar to the god. The Pater Primus will pray for your teacher’s release. Another sacrifice will be offered in her place. This should be sufficient.”
“ Should be?”
His eyes met mine with a cool amusement. “When are the doings of gods ever certain?”
Septio passed out of the circle into the shadows at the back of the hall. I remained with the priests, who continued to ignore me. Instead we all watched the pool. In time, the salt storm collapsed to a swirl of pale crystals on the ground. Without turning his head, the avatar reached behind and grasped the Dancing Mistress’ ankle. He dragged her through the swirl to an iron door. There he banged his fist three times.
