by Jay Lake
Their words were on edge as well.
“… the Prince of the City taken. Those damnable Street Guild thugs…”
“… doesn’t matter anyway. What do the likes of us care for who…”
“… Bittern Court. Issuing orders and everything. Why, my cousin said…”
“… not from the Starling Court. They sent two patrols out…”
“… fighting all along the monied streets. Been a long time since I was grateful to be poor…”
Words, words, and more words, building the sort of picture that rumor so often can create. Fragments of fear and confusion and misunderstanding spread around me like wood chips on the rising tide. Not panic, not that—to most of these people, the contests for power that ranged among the wealthy were at best a sport viewed from a distance. Everyone needed to eat; everyone needed water carried and roofs repaired and the business of the city to go on.
Still, when the great came to trading blows, it was almost always the small who took the wounds.
That was precisely what worried me the most. If the tensions here had escalated to open fighting, how would that bitch Surali view the hostage value of Corinthia Anastasia and Samma? I was not certain she would see any further point in negotiating when everything was teetering on the risk of bare blades and flowing blood.
Surely anyone as high in the courts as she was must be too canny a player to throw aside an advantage. Keeping our two missing alive was cheap enough, and not nearly so irreversible as killing them. That thought was small comfort. Likewise the realization that Surali was far more likely to kill them in front of me, and thus was probably maintaining both of my lost ones with that goal in mind.
The Blades had never played the game of hostages or kidnapping. When we took on a Death Right killing, it was straight to the target. Surali’s way of fighting soiled everyone.
Increasingly irritated by my own thinking, I stalked through the plaza that stretched before the temple, past the Beast Market and the Blood Fountain. To my immense relief, the Temple of the Silver Lily stood intact. Wherever the flames were, they were not here. The goddess’ house seemed closed in, drawn down upon itself, but I realized that sense must come as much from my own feelings about being cast out as from any aspect of the building that was home to so many of my former Sisters.
Future Sisters, as well, though in that moment I could not have known what was to come. Even now, I would not change that if I could. But then, had I known, I might have refused my destiny.
Satisfied that the temple was not afire, I followed rumor and smoke to the Street of Feathers. There a number of the Courts and Guilds had their chief houses. Much like the Bittern Court’s palace along Shalavana Avenue, these were enormous compounds. Some enclosed massive structures, others a wider scattering of buildings and housing.
One of them billowed black smoke into the sky. Here the complex stench was palpable. My lungs burned anew. The road was full of servants and guards trying to bring water up in buckets and carts, trying to keep the fire from spreading, trying to hold off the curious, the inimical and—probably—the looters.
I did not need to get caught up in the mass of people. The Hawk Court was burning; that was enough for me to mark for further thought as I hurried away.
Why them? They controlled the granaries and riceries of the city, managed the Rice Exchange, taxed what came in the gates. Without the Hawk Court’s work among the farmers and brokers for thirty or forty leagues around the city, Kalimpura would starve. So why burn them out?
Not vengeance, as I had suspected at the first thought that the fire might be at my temple. Control, of course. Surali was not normally this crude. Her plotting tended more to the baroque, and any fire-setting at the Temple of the Silver Lily would have been paying back like for like, but I thought I could still see her hand in this. The fire might even have been an accident, an intended threat grown out of control.
No, I corrected myself. The Bittern Court’s threats were very real. Nothing “intended” about them.
Wondering why anyone would want to control Kalimpura, I headed back for our safe house. Safe for not much longer, to be sure. I knew I must tend to myself, my gear, and my dead. And more to the point, it was time to sort through what we must do next. Secrecy was no longer much of a cloak for me and mine.
* * *
At the house, I found my children sleeping in my room. Grateful for the peace, I slid free of my leathers and spent time tending both their wounds and mine. Candles for the dead would come later, I knew.
After an hour or so, my children awoke, but they’d given me time to clean and sew and oil. I felt like I might be ready for whatever came next. I gathered the fussing babies up and set out from my room.
Ilona and Ponce were talking in the hallway, fingers entwined as their faces almost touched. Both appeared vaguely guilty when I emerged. If my nose were not still so loaded with fire reek and ashy grit, I could have smelled the lust upon them.
So that was the way of it? As if I had not seen this coming. I found myself flashing into anger again, though I could not say toward whom or why. Ponce was never mine, I had not wanted him even as he made his interests clear. To whatever degree Ilona had been mine, her heart was long lost to me along with her stolen daughter.
Feeling surly, I wordlessly handed Marya to Ilona, then opened my robe to feed Federo. Let them both glimpse my breast and think on what it was they desired. Once my son had settled his too-painful mouth grip on me, I favored the two of them with a tight smile. “We must all talk.”
Ilona blushed, visibly restraining herself from glancing at Ponce. “Wh-what is happening in the city?”
“A burning,” I said, quoting Firesetter.
We muddled into the kitchen. I sent Ponce out to fetch Mother Vajpai. There was no point in bothering Firesetter. I’d glimpsed him in the garden, still locked in his mourning. He was not yet one of us. After his losing Fantail, I seriously doubted he would become so.
“There is a fire at the Hawk Court,” I said without preamble. “The compound is ablaze.”
“Why?” asked Ponce. “Who is the Hawk Court?”
“They provide rice and grain to the city,” Mother Vajpai replied shortly. “And profit much thereby. Someone else is seeking to take over both that monopoly and that revenue.”
“The Bittern Court’s argument is obvious enough,” I replied, having considered this on my way home. It was good to talk of something that didn’t remind me of Ponce and Ilona with their heads bent close together. “They control the docks now, including the handling of what the fishing fleet brings in. A selfless offer to assist in the management of the Hawk Court’s responsibilities would be sensible enough. Food flowing into the city is a longtime stock-in-trade of theirs.”
“The Bittern Court is burning out their rivals.…” Ilona looked thoughtful. She had Marya now, who was fussing, perhaps at the tension in our words. “They are moving ahead.” She clutched my daughter so tightly that Marya squeaked. “What will become of Corinthia Anastasia?”
“I have much the same fear for Samma,” I confessed, damning my own honesty as Ilona’s face crumpled. “We will act soon. As soon as we can manage to do so.”
“It will never be soon enough,” she whispered. “Far too late for that already.”
“What do you propose, Green?” asked Mother Vajpai tartly. I knew she was trying to divert the despair toward which this conversation was driving.
“Now is the time to call up whatever allies we can. Mother Argai’s work among the Blades will either bear fruit or it will not. But we must move against Surali. Our time for patience is at an end.”
Ilona made as if to rise from her chair, but I raised a hand, shifting Federo’s weight in my other arm. “Not yet,” I added. “Like I said, let us seek out our friends. If I need to, I will do this alone. But far better not to.”
How I would do this alone was beyond me.
“Mother Argai is still on the streets,” Mother V
ajpai pointed out.
“Then I will go to the temple. I can enter through the kitchens. They will not betray me.”
“No.” Her voice was flat, final.
“No?” I looked Mother Vajpai over carefully, trying to sort out if that had been an order or advice, or something else. Her deference to me seemed highly variable.
“I shall go. If things are awry within the temple, better that they fall on me than on you, Green. Should you be taken up or held against your will, I cannot myself carry the fight to the Bittern Court.” Her smile was crooked as one hand waved at her maimed feet. “Besides, if there is a discussion to be had, the senior Mothers will listen to me far more closely than they will heed you. They have known me longer, and I do not have your erratic history.”
The desire to argue with her was almost overwhelming, but her logic was correct. If our last, desperate hope was a small raid on the Bittern Court, I would be the one to take such action. Preferably with Mother Argai at my side, but alone if need be. Mother Vajpai’s grasp of temple politics and personalities was decades better honed than mine. She could call on old trusts, forgotten favors, and all the complexities of a long life among women I had known only a few years.
And in the end, I was still a foreigner to them.
“Go, then,” I said gracelessly. “Find what you will. If you are not back tonight, we will decide what must be done next.”
“Mother Argai will aid you.” Mother Vajpai’s voice was uncomfortable. I wondered, as she obviously did, if Mother Argai was now a target as well.
“I would escort you,” I told her, my voice soft in one last try.
“No, Green. Stay here and think on what to do.”
What to do if she came back, or what to do if she did not come back, Mother Vajpai had not said. I bowed my head to her and watched my second-greatest teacher limp from our little council of war.
Then it was time to switch the babies and breasts, and do what was needful for them awhile. Being a mother did not stop even for the possible fall of a city.
* * *
After a time, I went back out to see what Firesetter was about. He still knelt in exactly the same position as I had last found him. A coal demon statue indeed, though he was not so threatening as they. Not like this, a giant man drawn into himself on a rack of grief and mourning.
“That was not your fire on the morning air,” I told him. To the Smagadine hells with the neighbors. If they saw me, I would slay them, too.
My only answer was a rumbling noise. At least he’d heard.
Or so I thought.
I tried again. “The Bittern Court is killing this city in pieces. They will remake it as their own.”
Gravel slid along his throat. “What is this to me?”
A rough response, but it was a response. Firesetter could hardly be anything but awkward right now, mourning the death of Fantail, whoever she had been to him.
“This is nothing to you, most likely.” I saw no point in being anything but honest with him. “Kalimpura is not your city, is it?”
More silence awhile. Then: “I have no cities. I am a Red Man of Selistan. Our cities are long gone to glittering dust.”
Where are your people? I thought, but did not say, for it seemed cruel. Firesetter was like me, raised far away from those who should have known and loved him best. It was a strange kinship, but I understood his loss deep down in my bones. “This is the principal metropolis of Selistan. You have a claim on this place. This place has a claim on you.” The same was certainly true of me.
“Once there was a great city of brass and iron amid the Fire Lakes.…” His voice trailed off, chasing his thoughts into some private oblivion.
I gave his introspection some time, for I did neither of us a service in pressing him. After a while I picked up where Firesetter had left off. “Your city of brass is lost now, like so much. We cannot walk backwards through our lives.”
Still he was awkward in conversation. “I would walk backwards through the past day.”
Both of us glanced down at Fantail, resting peacefully in the bottom of the pond. Firesetter’s movements were strangely precise, as if he’d become mechanically jointed. As his words had been.
“There is much I would take back and do over,” I told him. “My woes are thick and my enemies legion. All I can do is take arms against them and swim onward through this sea of strife.”
His response to that was both cryptic and encouraging. “Mafic…”
Wisps of steam rose off the pond. That was not so much encouraging, given what had happened the last time we had discussed Firesetter’s old teacher. Trainer. Slavemaster. Whatever Mafic had been.
I stated the obvious by way of encouragement. “That man is the source of much of your trouble.”
“Trouble is as we allow it.” The steam stopped rising. “They … hurt … me.”
“You were beaten as a child?” This hurt I could certainly grasp from my own experience.
Firesetter slowly turned his head to stare at his arm as if he’d never seen it before. “With this skin? It would have done them no good.” Then his long, sloping face rotated toward me and our gazes met. I realized that this Red Man was quite handsome in his strange way. “It takes much to harm me.”
A strange vision occurred to me, of Firesetter and the Rectifier sparring. There was a match I might have given a great deal to witness, in happier times. These were not happy times. Not now. “The hurts were in your heart.” This, too, I understood.
“Mmm…” Another of those graveled rumbles. “Your mind seems to be your own. Not ensnared by others.”
“Well, perhaps.” I’d always thought so, at least; whatever others might have done to twist and train my thoughts, they were still my thoughts. Still, was this ever truly the case? Federo-the-man and the Factor had certainly ensnared my mind in the years of my upbringing under their care.
“My mind is not my own. Not so much. Some things when brought to my notice hurt me. Some things hurt me until I leave them off, for fear they will shatter me.”
Yet he claimed to be difficult to harm. The greatest weapons were the ones that worked from within. A blade’s edge could only stop a heart; it could not break one. “Ah.” I had no idea what else to say. I could not assuage the wounds upon his soul. The only one who could do so lay in the bottom of the pond before us. A strange funeral rite, but no stranger than the sky burials of the Bhopuri people in the land of my birth. There are, after all, only four elements. Each of us must each go back to one or another of them in our time.
Still, a response seemed called for. “To speak of Mafic raises this hurt, then?”
He nodded too precisely. More steam wisped on the pond. At least we were unlikely to set a fire out here. It seemed worth my time to map the edges of his pain, for they might tell me something of the Saffron Tower, or at least its methods. And Firesetter was cooperating, in his strange, sullen way.
“Also it hurts you to speak on how you were raised.”
Another nod. More steam. Firesetter looked sidelong at me again, only his head moving as before so that he seemed as a statue swiveling only one of its parts. “And to think on where my kind had come from. They told me I was a made thing. Belonging to the Tower. Having no others in the world but me.”
Now he was wreathed in hot clouds of water. The surface of the pond was beginning to churn.
“Let it go if you can.” I touched his arm again. His skin was warmer, too, still slick and solid as stone. “You are beyond their reach.”
“No one is beyond their reach.” His voice was what passed for a mumble in such a giant of a man.
“I do not believe that. The plate of the world is infinitely longer than a man can walk in a lifetime.” I thought back on something the Dancing Mistress had told me quite some time ago, and felt a stab of heart’s pain for my troubles. “Somewhere there are purple seas, where people converse in a language of flowers. Somewhere on this earth there is anything you can imagine. Th
e writ of the Saffron Tower cannot run everywhere.”
“Everywhere I might go,” he amended grudgingly. The pond was calm again.
“Iso and Osi told me much,” I said, angling into the subject from a new direction. “About the fall of the titanics, and theogenic dispersion, and the Saffron Tower’s purpose in correcting what they see as an ancient wrong between men and women.” That was putting the matter far more kindly that it actually deserved, but I did not intend to argue either theology or gender with Firesetter.
“I am no monk.” He sighed with a noise like the great kettle boiling at the heart of one of those iron ships from the Sunward Sea. “Fantail knew more of this. They always sent their orders through her.”
That piqued my curiosity. “How?”
“Messenger, mostly.”
Well, that was mundane.
He continued: “Sometimes through wind and wave.”
Wind and wave? My heart fluttered. I’d had more than enough of wind and wave lately, sufficient to frighten the experienced crew of Prince Enero as well as half the waterfront population of Kalimpura. “Why that method?”
He seemed surprised, and that emotion drew a more genuine, open expression onto his face than what the withdrawal of grief had left there. “Fantail is—was—a water sprite. She can hear the right call across an ocean’s distance.”
“Ah.” I had not yet met Fantail when the storm at sea was calmed. It could not have been her doing, I realized. Nor did she likely have so much power. Those were the acts of a god. Or a titanic. “Thank you.”
“Mmm.” His body settled, muscles shifting for the first time I’d seen that day. As if the statue were waking up.
I took that for encouragement and tried to drive the conversation further forward. “So you did not worry much about the purpose of your work.”
“What I did is what I did. Who has purpose, really?”
“Slaying goddesses? That is not just employment. Or adventure, even. That is a mission. A … a quest.”
“Life is a quest, Mistress Green. Most pursue it no further than their doorstep, but it is still a quest.”
Well, he certainly had the right of that. “Your quest is finding the wellspring of your people,” I said softly.
