by Jay Lake
“Brooms sweep.” With those words, I startled awake. My stomach was sour and sharply pained.
Had that been a true sending of Desire? Always before I had met the divine wide awake. I suspected my own thoughts of playing tricks on me.
In any case, no omens presented themselves by way of either validation or contradiction. I could not tell which it was; sending or subtle thoughts of my own. And perhaps it did not matter.
Loitering at the bottom of a well to talk to goddesses and titanics in one’s sleep smacked of haruspication in any case. I was no fortune-teller to say sooth and cast the future.
In truth, what had the gods ever done but trouble me? At that thought, I mumbled a silent prayer of apology to the Lily Goddess for doubting Her. If any of them could hear me down here, it was She, whose temple was not so far away, and whose city this was. At least in part.
Above, the shouting changed tone again. I cocked my head to an odd rushing noise. High wind passing through the city, perhaps. I wondered at that. What was I hearing?
Screaming started again. This time I seriously doubted it was the tiger. Not in broad daylight. Screaming, then shouting about the harbor, followed by the sound of a large mass of people moving in a very determined manner in a common direction.
I did not like hiding in the sewers. Not when strange doings were afoot in the city.
The rushing noise grew louder. I realized water was pooling around my feet and pouring into the well shaft next to me. Brown and bubbling, it smelled brackish.
I stepped through the little embrasure that led into the tunnels beyond. Water was flowing over the lip there. In the tunnel, it ran calf-deep.
The wrong way.
This stream was coming up from the outflows at the harbor’s edge. Water was entering the city from the ocean. I trailed my fingers in it, though that was hardly necessary to experience the rank, salty odor. The harbor was climbing to meet me once more.
And it was doing so in a manner sufficient to cause a panic in the streets above.
Already the water was at my knees. I could read this situation as well as any other woman who was not also a fool. Whether Desire had come to me in a dream or I’d imagined Her message for myself, the meaning was the same. No longer could I hide down here.
No longer could I hide at all.
Not that this argument was difficult for me. I rarely turned away from confrontation. I just needed a different way of facing Surali.
Water swirled around me with more force now. Coming from the harbor, it was still mucky. Bits of wood and slime and all the odd jetsam of a waterfront were carried on its dark eddies. I began pushing against the flow, trying for the few blocks to reach the harbor outflow before it rose too high for me to continue.
It swiftly became apparent that my problem would not be the depth of the water, but the force. Any fluid is heavy stuff. Pushing against the flow was like lifting a dead weight with every step. Though I held my knives in my hands, they were growing wet with the salt water. That, in turn, would endanger the blades.
Up and out. I looked for a ladder, a hatch, a grate.
Again I missed the Below of Copper Downs. That city was lousy with tunnels, undermined as any insect warren. One could go almost anywhere and emerge easily enough. Kalimpuri had never spent so much effort building down. For one thing, this place was not located atop an ancient set of mines.
This city was, however, located on a harbor front that seemed intent on finding its way to me.
After a very hard block’s push, I came upon another access. A wooden ladder was bolted to the wall of a wider vault. The rising harbor water swirled there in a deeper eddy—there was enough space here for that countercurrent to move freely. A trapdoor blocked the top of the ladder. I could see by the faint light around its loose edges.
One of the ice warehouses, I thought. During the northern winters, they brought blocks of the stuff in from the Stone Coast in straw-packed holds of fast ships, then stored it in thick-walled warehouses. Something that was a dreadful nuisance in Copper Downs was a fantastic luxury in Kalimpura, commanding almost its own weight in gold.
And sometimes it needed to be dumped, when it grew too rotten or dirty to be used.
I set my shoulder against the trap and pushed up. Water climbed below me, plucking like eager hands.
The trap did not budge. Latched. Or worse. Perhaps something heavy had been set across it from above.
Balancing on the ladder, I studied the faintly illuminated edges. Light from above was my friend right now. Hinges were shadows on the sides to my right and my left. The split in the middle did not admit any glow, so there was a lath or similar overlap between the panels of the trap. One would not put a bar in the midst of a trapdoor, I did not think.
But I could not see another latch blocking light at the edges.
I pushed up at the center of the door with my long knife. Water swirled at my waist now. If I’d remained in the tunnel below, I’d be breathing either that stuff or stone. My choices might not be much better here soon either.
“I understand,” I told whoever might be listening. Not prayer, exactly. “I am leaving as quickly as I can.”
The long knife didn’t do much. Clinging to the ladder still, I carefully switched to the short knife. I hated how much I was coming to depend on that blade. Any weapon you could not throw away at need was a weakness.
That blade went through the split in the doors as if the wood were damp paper. I leaned out and dragged the knife from one end to the other. That also had the advantage of admitting a little bit more light.
Another push with my shoulders, water above my waist now, and the doors lifted. I scrambled up into a fairly large room gasping with the panic I had not allowed myself to feel until I was free of that increasingly small space.
This was a moment I needed to allow myself—hands on knees, head bent low, breath whooping, my entire body shivering with a bitter, frightening cold.
You could not fight water. It did not care for blades or strength. Fists of the world, indeed. How did sailors stand going down to sea?
Shaking off the panic as water began to pool around me, I looked around. I had been correct about this being an icehouse. This was a cutting and weighing room, where the blocks were counted out. Several large scales waited along one wall like great brass scuttles. Chains overhead allowed the blocks to be maneuvered rather than simply shifted by brute force. The floor was littered with grit and straw and puddles of melt. A thick sliding door to my right must lead toward the cold rooms—twice my height, and even wider than it was tall, huge enough that someone could have driven a wagon through it.
And possibly they did. As I recalled, ice was heavy. How did one shift it about, even inside a warehouse?
I slid open the other door, a much thinner one that led to a loading dock as I’d expected. People milled about in the streets, a babble of activity and panic rising like steam from a griddle.
I jumped down from the dock. Fingers of water crept along the cobbles.
It was time for me to face the sea again.
That thought brought a twist of stomach-wrenching dread. There was nothing for me to do but turn toward my fear.
Sheathing my knives, for they would do me no good now, I trotted toward the Street of Ships and the harbor that clawed restive from its basin to mount the land like an eager paramour.
* * *
The quays and piers were awash. Water flowed ankle-deep on the Street of Ships itself, which ran atop the seawall that edged the waterfront district. People had taken to the roofs and loading docks of the buildings along the roadway. The ships tied up were crowded at the rails—some of the captains must have allowed the panicked dockside folk aboard. Or perhaps they had not been given much of a choice.
Seawater surged toward me as the tide would do when driven by a great storm. But there was no storm. The ocean crested here in eerie silence as if it were being drained into Kalimpura. Looking up at water was an unnerving
experience on a ship at sea. Standing on the shore and looking up at water churned my guts to jelly.
I drew my short knife. Blackblood’s ichor had cut the wind and rain before. And it gave me a prop, something with which to point. Gripping the weapon in an unsteady hand, I advanced down the Coin Pier, as that was closest to me.
“Return to sleep,” I said loudly to the waters boiling cold around me. “I call on the Lily Goddess. I call upon Endurance. I call upon Desire, and Her brother Time Himself. Bend back this tide and return us to balance.”
Salt water swirled around me. Sea foam danced, twisted, tormented as if by wind and wave, though the air was as flatly still as that in any wine cellar. And, for Kalimpura, as strangely cool. Still, the water piled up.
I tried to push, seeking to recapture what I had felt from the bridge walkway of Prince Enero. But much as when I had called the ox god into being on the street in front of the Textile Bourse, I could recall the moment without remembering how I had found my way there.
The memory of the divine is like the memory of pain—you know you have experienced it, but you cannot relive the experience. In the years since, I have come to realize this protects us all from the sharp edges with which the world is filled. Every day dawns like shattered glass, then passes to depart on bladed wings, which only the ignorant and the lucky survive unscathed.
How mightily I tried to cast off my ignorance in that moment. The water mounted around me, swirling, until I stood knee-deep at the bottom of a bowl of air, its sides defined by racing foam and the rippling dance of the skin of the sea. I smelled seaweed and iodine and fish and wet, dank death—reminded suddenly of the great, toothed monster that had reached to grasp my life when I’d first fled Federo off the deck of Fortune’s Flight back near the beginning of my life.
The sky narrowed above me, the water closing like a fist. Words came to me unbidden, in the manner of a spell remembered without ever having been memorized. “Back into your bed, Mother Ocean!” I shouted. My voice boomed, as if I had lungs the size of houses, and the great slow breathing of forest and field. “Now is not yet the time when you can claim the land for your own.”
When would that be? I thought idiotically, struck by a vision of both my countries being conquered by tall, white-haired armies of waves.
Something rippled in the round patch of sky above me. This was how the air must look to a frog at the bottom of a pond, perhaps. Everything became thick, wet, until the tip of my knife was met by the tightening wall of water closing around me like a liquid coffin.
Spray spouted where the god-blooded tip scored the dancing surface. The enclosing wave opened like a wound. The ocean crashed around me, drenching me, but somehow I stood my ground while it poured away in a rush of bubbling foam and flopping fish. Ships along the Coin Pier swayed in danger of turning turtle as the water raced back to join its source.
Around me the streets drained. This rogue arm of the ocean rushed past me bearing dead rats, bedraggled cats, bruised fruit, shoes—all the debris of the daylight city. It flowed into the harbor in a thinning waterfall over the edge of the seawall. What had taken the better part of an hour to wash into the city was gone in minutes.
I stood watching a bright silver fish flop and gasp in a stray puddle and wondered once again what I had just done. My body had the shivering, addled feeling I’d come to associate with the divine. Once more I whispered quiet gratitude to my goddesses.
Gods were a greater pain to me than men—I would have sworn to it in that moment. And many times since, for that matter. What do any of us know, after all, except what we are shown? And who can show more than a god?
Still, any time give me a decent curry and a good night’s sleep by preference over a mountaintop and the kingdoms of the world.
* * *
They came for me before I’d retreated a dozen steps from the water’s edge. Not the Street Guild, but rather the street itself. First it was a knot of beggars, cooing at me and crying to touch even my boots. Then a crowd of sailors and merchants of the usual dockside order. They shouted an erupting chaos of thanks and praise and effusive tears.
I tried to eel out of the line of grasping hands, to escape into streetwise anonymity, but these were having nothing of that. Some even knew my name, and soon the chant was “Green, Green, Green.”
These were not people toward whom I would bare a blade, or strike with fist and foot. So I allowed them to sweep me along. What else was I to do?
We paraded down the Street of Ships to the Great Chain, then back again to the Coin Pier. I was soon riding on shoulders. People brought out poles from which dangled strings of firecrackers. Their rippling explosions reminded me painfully of the long guns used aboard Prince Enero, but nothing buzzed past my face; no death blossomed from this one’s chest or that one’s head.
Gongs, too, and bells liberated from temple precincts. A pushcart that had somehow survived the flood appeared with fire and hot nuts. Three tiny men in greasy red silk tunics and flat hats arrived with long metal skewers impaling haunches of meat dripping with fat and cracklings. The smells reached my nose even above the fug of the crowd and made me realize my hunger. I beckoned for one, reckoning the gesture futile, but one of the men grinned, showing filed teeth stained crimson. He flicked his pole so the topmost haunch slipped free and tumbled through the air.
I caught it like a thrown knife, huge as the hunk of meat was, and tore into the roasted flesh. Uncaring, I dripped fat on the people carrying me, but they grinned and waved and shouted. Soon I was being overloaded with food and flowers like some household god on a funeral palanquin.
It was a dream, a strange dream, and in this dream I was hideously vulnerable. Visible to anyone with a bow or spear, bareheaded beneath the morning sky, surrounded by a singing, shouting swirl of waterfront humanity. Music blared loudly. A cart with a coal demon statue rumbled after us.
This was truly a festival. These same people could just as easily have torn me limb from limb for bringing the killing water down upon them, but of course, they had not seen that. Any more than they’d known I was aboard Prince Enero those days ago, or had the least notion of what took place out upon the Storm Sea.
All they’d seen was me laying the water to rest. I could fight this mass of people even less than I could have fought the tide, had some god or goddess—which, I did not know—not heeded me. Ilona’s warning about me becoming a Selistani storm goddess might have been more prophetic than she knew.
Still, there was nothing for it. I smiled, caught more flowers, was showered with mostly copper coins, and allowed myself to borne toward the statue of Maja’s Boar on Savvatana Street.
In all this messy business, I realized I had not seen any Street Guild. These laborers and stevedores and sailors and tavern wenches and shopkeepers and beggars and brokers were all people with little cause to love the Street Guild. And they knew I had fought their enemies before.
I was safer here and now than I would be among a Blade handle on a run. In a sense, this was a restaging of the beggars’ riot I’d helped put on not too many days ago.
The chanting and shouting continued. I tried to listen, but it was hard to pick out words amid the rising and falling racket. They shouted against the Bittern Court, against the Street Guild, and for the Blades. Not so much for the Lily Goddess or Her temple, not that I could hear, but for now, I was among them, being carried as theirs.
I would take this for what it was.
Eventually I was set down in Ardi Square, where bonfires were being built out of smashed market booths and overturned carts. More food appeared, and tall poles with flags, and even more of those foolish fireworks that now sounded too much like weapons to me.
Set down, I took a deep draft of a proffered bowl of what turned out to be rice wine. Offered a pair of arms, I danced. Handed a child, I dandled her. Everyone wanted to touch me. After a while, it felt as though everyone had done so. No tiger roared, no angry armored men chased after me, and though my chil
dren were still too distant for my comfort, otherwise it was not so bad a way to pass the lengthening day. Hidden, as it were, in the plainest sight.
* * *
Once the madness finally died down, I slipped away in the shadows of evening. Fortified by strong drink and rich food, I did not walk in so straight a line as I might have liked. I counted the day a success in that I had not collected that arrow in the back I’d been fearing.
Half the city had seen me, and what little protection my remaining anonymity had granted me was long lost. Still, I had done some good from the mess I’d created the night before.
How to explain all this to the Mothers and Ponce and Ilona, though …
I’d acquired someone’s midnight blue robe and wore it now, along with several garlands of flowers. I seemed to be carrying a pair of protesting chickens. Their feet were wired together. When had I picked them up?
Well, no one looking for the renegade Lily Blade Green would see me in the staggering progress of a half-drunk poultry seller. Or poultry buyer. Or whatever I was. At least the Street Guild would not be likely to know me either.
It occurred to me somewhat belatedly that I could not simply hammer on the front gate of our hidden house. The place was not supposed to be inhabited, after all. And I wasn’t sure how Mother Argai found her way in and out. I had gone over the wall very late at night when no one was looking.
Picking my path with some care, I found myself in the narrow street behind our back wall. This faced onto another row of great houses, unlike the back of the Bittern Court’s compound. So fewer eyes, and even fewer suspicions unless I was spotted by happenstance.
I sidled up to the service entrance of our house, glanced around, then tossed the chickens over the top of the gate. After that, I stumbled a bit farther down the street, not waiting to see if anyone noticed. Looking around in a guilty manner was like hanging a sign.
Near the corner of the property, I scrambled up the wall and dropped into the neighboring lot. There I crashed into a large stand of ferns. I lay there awhile, breathing shallow, and strained to listen for any hue and cry. If someone had noticed me, they would surely raise the alarm. Preferably with the neighbors rather than to the supposedly empty house.
