by Jay Lake
I found a series of rotten grates in the wall below the street frontage. Clearly I was not the first to pass this way, for two had been twisted open. Figuring on the tunnels they covered being stormwater outflows for the streets beyond, I slipped in the first and followed the pipe at a low crouch. If I had been given to fear of tight places, that one might have panicked me, but in less than two hundred paces, I was inside a catchment. I knew from the distance and direction to Arvani’s Pier that I must now be under the Plaza of Broken Swords. With a deep breath, I found my bearings. There would be an access in the little park just north.
Once among the mango trees, I squeezed what water I could from my robes. I looked beyond disgraceful, but I still knew how to carry myself. Slipping out into the street, I slunk toward the Lily Temple. A few people stared. Most knew better.
When I passed a fireseller’s cart along the curb, I stopped. She was a woman of middle years, plain-faced and worn with the effort of her life. She was also visibly frightened at my appearance.
“I would have a black candle and a white one,” I told her. “And some punk or matches to light them. I . . . I have no money with me, but can leave my good steel knife as surety. The Temple of the Silver Lily will stand for it.”
“N-no, Moth—. . . sister . . .” Her fright deepened. Hands fluttered like birds as she began pushing candles at me. “Take what you will. I offer to the Goddess.”
I opened my mouth to thank her, but a whirlwind overtook my words, and left something distant and calm within her eyes. I nodded, claimed the box of lucifer matches and two candles that suited me best, and stepped into the next quiet alley.
Three boys rolled a drunk there, while a thin dog tied to a drainpipe barked weakly.
“Out!” I roared. Their sneers broke as they saw my face, and they fled. The dog whimpered as it tried to hide behind the pipe. The drunk just moaned.
I knelt in the stinking slime that scummed the bricks. There I scraped clean a patch with the edge of my hand and set out the two candles. I placed the sorry, ragged mess that was Curry’s eyes before them.
The black candle I lit first. “H-he violated the Death Right,” I told the alley. Curry’s shade as well, should the man still be listening. Perhaps his gods heard me, if they were not resting silently far away across the Storm Sea.
His surprise loomed large in my memory. Curry had not protested his death. Rather, he had thought to find it at a different hand. Perhaps there were games played here that went beyond strongboxes.
I found that I did not care. Curry and I had played but one game: the game of life. He had lost. So have I.
Then I lit the white candle. “His debt to the Death Right is settled.” That did not seem to be the sort of kindness that should be said to send a man’s soul back onto the Wheel. I knew nothing of Michael Curry but his contempt for me. Like the nameless bandit whose life I had claimed, he must have had at least one grace. “Surely his mother loved him.”
I threw up once more, filled with the awful sense of having done something beyond retrieval. When that finally settled, I reclaimed the packet of my victim’s eyes. Then I stood and wiped my hands against the ruins of my robe. The drunk stirred. “Lost a friend of yours?” he mumbled.
“Yes,” I said. “Though I knew him only at the last.”
Heading back for the temple, I wondered what would be done with me.
Mother Vajpai took the crumpled mess of velvet. She eyed it with speculation, then looked me up and down. I stood before her in one of the belowground practice rooms. We were at little risk of being overheard or interrupted there.
“Did the Goddess guide your hand?” She chose her words with care.
I did not feel up to liturgical games. “She guided me in my progress, at least. I struck true. He did have a pistol.”
“Mmm.” She turned the ragged bundle over to inspect it from all sides. “I am sorry we did not know to warn you of that. What of the proof demanded?”
“You will find a blue eye and a green eye within that,” I said. “Also, I need to deliver a handful of copper paisas to a fireseller on Longspear Avenue.”
She waved that aside with a flip of her hand. “I’ll send a girl. You should not go back out for a while.” Then Mother Vajpai opened the damp, sticky bundle. She looked at the eyes crushed within, then began to laugh. “Green, my child, you have the makings of a Mother Justiciar.”
“I did as I was asked, Mother Vajpai.”
“Did you find the strongbox key?”
“Yes, Mother.”
“What became of it?”
My feet suddenly became very interesting to me. “The Goddess snatched the key from my hand as I escaped Crow Wing. She sent it to the bottom of the harbor. Alongside Michael Curry’s pistol.”
“And you?”
“I am here.”
“After being aboard a ship that could have carried you back to Copper Downs,” she whispered softly.
“I will never return to Copper Downs!” Tears welled, my chest hurt, my body ached, and I was covered in slime. “I go to the baths.”
“Go, Green, and take my blessing with you.”
I stormed from Mother Vajpai’s presence in search of some way to clean my hands. The stain on my soul would be much harder.
In the baths, I poured the water as hot as the boilers would make it, until my skin puffed shiny and pink. Blood still stained my hands, crusted under my fingernails. None of the body brushes would clean it off. I was crashing through the little mop closet in search of something stiffer when Samma came in.
“Green, Green!” she shouted, and tugged me away from my effort. When she saw my hands, she shrieked. “Come with me, now, please. Jappa said this might happen.”
I raised my hand to slap her away, then stopped myself. “What does Jappa have to do with this?”
“Sh-she said you might . . .” Samma sniffed, swallowing her next words. “Please, dearheart, just come with me.”
Glowering, I allowed myself to be led. I was wet and naked, and shivering despite the heat. The pain in my hands was the only thing that mattered. Maybe that would cleanse me.
Samma dragged me down a hall, shouting for help until Ello came. “Get Jappa, and have her meet us in the small practice room below,” she told the little girl. Her voice broke.
“Are we to f-fight?” I asked.
“No, no, sweetling.” Samma stopped pulling me to kiss my forehead a moment. “Something else. Completely else.”
Jappa somehow found the small practice room before we did. I stumbled in, shivering cold, to find a fire in a glowing brazier. We never had open flames in these rooms. They were underground, and any blaze that escaped was too far from water to fight easily.
“Over here, Green,” Jappa said, taking me from Samma. “We’ll make it all right.”
A sword frame stood in front of me, a heavy-legged tripod to support a wooden practice dummy. I saw the dummy was off its mounts. Jappa leaned me face forward against the frame and drew my hands above my head. The skin of them burned. Was that Curry’s blood?
“Are you going to slash me now?” I asked.
“No, darling,” she said. “I will give you the gift that Mother Chapurma gave me when we were both aspirants, and I came back from my first killing.”
She tied me to the frame with small leather straps. “What do you feel?” Jappa whispered in my ear.
I heard Samma whimpering Jappa’s name, then mine.
“Nothing,” I said. “Only blood on my hands.”
“You killed a man you didn’t know.”
Like Samma, I whimpered, then nodded.
“Now you are so cold, you burned yourself with water, just to feel something.”
“M-Mistress Tirelle,” I gasped.
“I am going to hurt you now.” Jappa’s voice was husky, low as it got when she was ready for her release after I had ridden her sweetpocket hard. “Only a little, but when you feel the pain, you will know that your other feelings will
follow it back home to you.”
Closing my eyes, I whimpered again.
A crack echoed as I felt a lash across my naked back. I jumped against the frame, but truly it did not hurt even as much as a solid touch when we sparred in this very room. Samma shrieked once more.
Another crack, another touch of the lash—lower, across my buttocks. I jumped. She was right. The hot welt where the leather scored my skin reminded me of who I was.
A third blow, then Jappa leaned close. “Do you feel it?”
“Yes,” I gasped, then began to sob as she slowly flogged me. Blow after blow, driving me back from my cold place and into myself once more. Driving out the shade of Michael Curry. This was like the old beatings from Mistress Tirelle, except these were for me, to draw me in rather than push me away.
Somewhere in the middle, I felt the heat build in my sweetpocket. When Jappa set down her whip, I bucked, finding my own pleasure even as the splinters of the frame pushed into the front of my thighs, the crest of bone above my groin.
I had sworn I would never live under someone’s lash again. Now I swiftly came to love making a liar of myself.
Finally I lay shivering, my feet barely holding my weight against the pain of my binding. Jappa took me down. She and Samma drew some cloth around me and carried me weeping back to the dormitory. There Samma gave me suck against her breast while Jappa rubbed creams into my back and my poor burned hands, until I fell into the deepest, most dreamless sleep of my life.
______
The next morning, I was taken before Mother Vajpai, Mother Vishtha, and old Mother Meiko. They were in a room high up in the temple, where I had never before been. The space was more strangely shaped than most here, a teardrop with a floor across the bottom curve. The three sat in lotus on cushions. A single joss stick burned before them.
I was given a low stool with some quilted cotton folded across it.
“I . . . I might prefer to stand, Mothers,” I said when Mother Vajpai waved me to the seat. My buttocks still had welts. I was ashamed of everything I had done, or allowed to be done to me, the day before. That my hands were wrapped in oil-soaked cloth was the most direct evidence of my failings, but far from the only one.
“As it is to be pleasing you,” said Mother Meiko. “The chair is yours if you need it.”
“Thank you.” I bowed, but did not try to make the sign of the lily. Not with these hands, not in this state.
“When I took my first life,” Mother Vishtha said, “I did not return to the temple for three days. I was hiding in the banyans of Prince Kittathang Park the whole time, suckling eggs and chewing on leaves to banish my hunger.”
“I was finally bringing her home,” Mother Meiko added with a smile. “She was being my student, and time had come for her to return.”
Mother Vajpai spoke up. “When I took my first life, I came back and tried to assault my teaching Mother. She was eating at table in the refectory. I nearly caught her between the shoulders with a knife, when one of my sister Aspirants of the Blade stopped me.”
“Hah!” Mother Meiko glared at her. “You would never have been catching me. I watched the reflection of my wineglass as you were to be approaching.”
“And you—?” I asked her, the oldest. I saw clearly enough what they were doing.
“Me? I took a boat from the docks and rowed out to sea, until I was losing sight of the city.” Her eyes looked at something far away. “There I wanted to be in the world without a scrap of our land. The Goddess spoke to me from the water, and sent me home again.”
Mother Vajpai looked at me carefully and nodded slightly.
“The Goddess spoke to me yesterday,” I told them slowly. “Though I am not sure what she said. Once She used the voice of a child, and once Her words came from my mouth to a fireseller, though I could not hear them.”
“Now your hands are bandaged,” Mother Meiko said, “because you were being so diligent to scrub the blood away. You cannot walk well because you were having the sense beaten back into your body.”
“I needed to feel something.”
“Not all of us turn to the lash, Green,” said Mother Vishtha in that quiet voice. “But it is still being an honored road among the Mothers of this temple. The Blades especially. If you are moved to bend yourself over again, or to bend another girl to your will, please to be speaking to me first. I will show you what can be safely done without undue harm.” She smiled shyly. “Also how to find the most pleasure in what you do, at whichever end of the lash calls you the strongest.”
“All of that is between you and your heart,” said Mother Vajpai. “We will be aiding where we can, or when you ask. Something else is being between you and us, however.”
“She knows,” Mother Meiko added. The old woman laughed. “Her road has been harder than any of yours. I will be most surprised if it does not turn hard again along the way.”
“You want to know if I will be able to k-k-kill again. When asked . . . told.” Beneath my bandages, I flexed my fingers.
Mother Vajpai fixed me with her smoldering eyes. “Will you follow the will of the Goddess in this? Or do you need to turn to another path?”
I wondered what would happen if I declined now. Quite possibly I would not leave this room alive. They could hardly turn me to the street once they’d made me a killer. But I was yet unsworn. This must be a dangerous time for them.
With that, the fog that had wrapped my mind since stumbling home yesterday lifted. I was clear-eyed and clearheaded once more. A most welcome feeling.
There was time between the last Petal and taking vows. As much as a year for some girls. I could not yet swear to the Lily Goddess and her temple, did not know if I would. That meant I was not forced to tell a lie today in order to remain here a bit longer.
“Yes,” I said. “At need, when called. I have killed three times. As Mother Meiko said to me, it becomes a habit.”
“You are excused from all lessons and obligations until the next Monday,” said Mother Vajpai. “Rest, think, pray. You may wish to spend that time at services, but no one will look to count you in the sanctuary.”
It was not credible that I would be anything but closely watched. I would do the same in their place, after all. This was like the Pomegranate Court, without the walls. Except that I could choose what came next, which had never been in the way of things within the Factor’s house.
Whatever the Goddess wanted of our uneasy relationship, I would remain here awhile and listen. I might yet choose not to be used, but I would be here until then.
For a time there was no more killing. It did not take me long to realize that my unique circumstances were why Mother Vajpai had sent me for Michael Curry. Any sworn Blade would have found a shipboard killing on a northern vessel difficult. Whatever machinations had been upset within the Bittern Court did not flow back to me. Nor did I hear of the Temple of the Silver Lily suffering consequences.
I gathered some copper paisas and a beautiful flower from the altar and went to find my poor, frightened fireseller. Her cart was not where it had been. I searched every day for a week, but while finding people in Kalimpura was like finding birds in the sky, finding one person in Kalimpura was like finding a single, particular bird in the sky.
That was a disappointment.
Samma and I fought far more than before. I came to realize how much of a child she still was. She in turn was frightened by my flirtations with the lash. She soon kicked me out of bed. I took a pallet down by the end, sleeping by myself. Even the little ones began to avoid me.
I told myself I did not care.
I told myself I was a grown woman now, fourteen summers behind me and a fifteenth coming. I’d traveled the world and killed people, while these arrogant daughters of privilege knew nothing.
I told myself I was happy. Sometimes I even believed that. Killing Michael Curry had changed something else within me, though. His death had once more torn the cap off my well of rage. I took offense too easily, and use
d my prodigious strength to bully the other girls, to swagger in the streets and brush into the sort of boys who would fight a stranger without question. I kept my hair short and choppy. No one took me for a girl of the temple unless I walked pale-robed with the Mothers or some of the other aspirants. When I went out, I resumed binding my breasts, though they were never so large to begin with.
Once more, I was the tiger in the invisible cage that Little Kareen had seen around me. I lost the trick of being with people, of being one of them and one with them. In time, even the hard, old women such as Mother Argai liked me less, for I was more trouble to them than my lithe body and violently explosive passion were worth.
I still sparred with Mother Argai even after she stopped playing at sex with me. The same hardness that she disliked in me as a lover made me a good one to fight with, she claimed. “You’re not afraid for your face,” she’d growled. “Most young ones are. Ain’t been being roughed up enough yet.”
“I am what I am, Mother,” I told her with a leaping swing that touched the top of her head. This did little for me, as she scored on my ribs in the same pass.
“Who was it cut you so?”
“Me.” I grinned at the lift of her eyebrows. “I did it to myself.” As I spoke, I drove a hammerstrike with closed fist into her thigh.
We went to the baths after. Even though we no longer played at the flogging frame together, Mother Argai still liked to watch me wash. After all, we’d worked up the sweat side by side.
I lay stretched in the warm water, wondering if my breasts would ever be large enough to bob as Jappa’s did. Mother Argai’s had never grown so. She sat next to me with her eyes closed. I resisted the temptation to touch her on her certain spot along the hip. Instead I asked her about how best to get about in the city on my own.
“There’s something I’d like to do,” I started.
“Hmm. Ask someone else, girlie mine. I’m out of the business of doing you.”
