by Jay Lake
I also haunted the docks every day in my hand-sewn costume. The leather mask was a bit theatrical, but no one ever saw the slashes on my face, and it diverted attention from the Petraean accent I could never quite shake off.
Drinking among the tars required money. While the Blades drew no salary, let alone their aspirants, the Temple of the Silver Lily was more than wealthy. Since my part in the stand beneath the mango trees, the women of Mother Shesturi’s handle had made it known that my wishes were theirs. No one said anything more about my choice of clothing.
The Fallen Axe quickly became familiar to me. I spent time in winesinks with names like Risthra’s Nipple, Three Bollards, and The Bunghole. It was the barkeep at the Fallen Axe who named me, early in my adventures.
I walked in for the third day in a row, carrying a small purse of copper paisas and a few silver ones. “Oi,” he said. “If it ain’t the Neckbreaker back again. You must be liking of our brew.”
“Deep stuff, my friend.” I let the pain in my arm burr my voice. Likely enough they thought me some younger son of nobility skylarking about in a festival getup.
“I am giving you the better cask today,” he whispered so loudly, the rats in the alley behind the building probably heard. “On account of you almost being a regular customer and all.”
“Mmm.” I made it a point never to thank people when dressed in my blacks.
His barmaid smiled as she brought me a bowl. Even with her missing teeth and the sores at the corner of her mouth, I could see the beauty she would have been. “Here is being your brew now, Neckbreaker.” Her wink was meant to be flirtatious.
If I were in fact the younger son of a great house here in the city, I would be quite a catch. An hour’s dalliance could bring her more reward than months of working drudge at these tables.
I smiled at her, knowing that she would glimpse the crinkle in my eyes.
The stuff was somewhat less foul than his earlier bowls. It slipped up easily enough beneath the edge of my veil. I sat and listened.
Over time, since I had begun haunting the docks, I realized just how many tongues came to this port. Seliu was always spoken to some degree—it was the local language of coin.
Of course, I listened for Petraean. I spoke it better than Seliu, even now, and no one around me would think it my language to look at me. Hanchu I could follow a little bit, and I quickly came to recognize the quick, pattering consonants of Smagadine. There were half a dozen more languages I heard almost every day, and a dozen more than that passed in a given week.
I would never know them all.
Seliu and Petraean were the two most important. Selistan and the Stone Coast stood at each end of the child trade, at least as it had taken me. I had promised myself to stop that somehow, someday.
Yet a ship might have sailors from anywhere within ten thousand leagues of whatever water it sailed upon. Given that the plate of the world was wider than anyone had ever compassed, it followed that the tongues were just as widely scattered. Presuming that the gods had not played some joke and fastened the ends of all things together in a great circle, of course.
We often drilled at our violence on dogs, in the practice room with the channels in the floor and the good drains. Strays were like sand on a beach in Kalimpura. The larger ones took wounds much as people did. Pigs were better for close work, due to similarities that their arrangement of skin and organs held with those of humans. In sparring with spear and short knife, though, I became convinced that I wished to best a bullock.
“You are cracked,” Mother Adhiti told me one day after a grueling session. We’d bruised each other blue and green, like so many orchids tattooed upon our bodies.
“No, no, don’t you see? A bullock would draw out all our strength.” I could see it as a certain man, implacable, powerful, and just as subject to death as any dumb animal.
She looked at me strangely. Even at my current growth, the woman outweighed me twice over and more. “A bullock in a small room like this would draw out all my fear. You would be trampled like plum paste beneath a child’s feet.”
“Then we can fight it at a festival. Make a show of things.” I had not set to with a blade in earnest since the night we’d fought under the mangoes, though months had passed. There would be no more black work until I had sworn my final vows—that was sound-enough policy. Besides, at the moment, I was neither well liked nor widely trusted outside my own handle.
Mother Adhiti mopped her neck. “The temple does not concern itself so much with that sort of spectacle, as you well know, Green. Like all sharp weapons, the Lily Blades are most effective when still in the scabbard.”
“Sheathed, we must always be sheathed.” I flexed my knuckles, which ached deliciously.
“If you want to fight so much, go pick trouble down at those docks you seem to love.” Now she was grumpy. “Forget this foolishness with a bullock. No one would let you fight one even if it was our way. You are the youngest and smallest of the Blades.”
With that, she left me. I was no Blade at all, of course.
I shook off my fantasy of fighting such a large animal and followed Mother Adhiti out into the hallway. It was always warm and damp down here, where the temple extended out beneath the buildings and grounds around it. Really, all they’d done was lay claim to some of Below, walling off passages and bringing light and water where they could.
When we reached the stairs that spiraled up into the main part of the building, I found Mother Meiko sitting on the bottommost step. Her walking stick was propped beside her. She drew from a short, stumpy pipe. Today instead of our usual pale robes, she wore the oil-stained pale blue muslin of a woman of the Bucket Carrier Caste.
“Good day, Mother.” I set down my weapons and made the sign of the lily toward her.
“Green.” She sucked noisily on the pipe a moment, then cupped it loose in her hands. “Girl,” she added.
I waited. This woman had come down here for me. She would tell me what she came for when she was ready to do so.
“You desire to fight some great cow, or so I am overhearing.”
“A bullock, Mother.”
“Mmm.” Mother Meiko studied the smoldering wisp within the bowl of her pipe. “An animal. Tell me. What are you?”
“An Aspirant of the Lily Blades of this temple.”
“No. You are not that.”
I was surprised. “Nothing else, Mother.”
“If you were an aspirant of my Blades here, you would be sleeping in the dormitory. Attending, or teaching, the classes with the other aspirants.” She leaned closer. “You would be helping the children of our temple instead of mooning after those whom fate has swept away.”
My desire for an end to child selling was hardly mooning, but I was not willing to argue that with her. “I am what I am.”
“The Goddess has ceased speaking to you.” That was not a question.
“Yes,” I admitted. “I have not heard Her since before I fought alongside the rest of Mother Shesturi’s handle.”
“The rest of Mother Shesturi’s handle.” She snorted. “To be listening to yourself. You claim you are an aspirant in one breath, and a Blade in the next. Here is what you are, Green: You are being neither this thing nor that. You are being a girl who will not choose which of her fates she is to follow. You are being nothing at all.”
“Mother.” I tucked my chin low.
Her pipe tapped my forehead. “We are nearly upon the moon that brings us Vaisakha month. You are nearly being to your fifteenth summer. That is old enough to be an auntie or wife. Or a sworn Blade. When the month of Vaisakha ends, come back and be telling me if you will swear your vows.”
“Otherwise?” I asked, my voice barely above a breath.
Nothing pleasant rode in Mother Meiko’s smile. “Otherwise you will be cast upon the goodwill of the Goddess. Ask yourself how much care you have been showing Her, girl. Ask yourself how much care She is to be showing you in return.”
I was rem
inded then that this was the Blade Mother, who stood over all of us. She could kill as easily as she could count the days of the week and with no more remorse. Throwing me out of the Temple of the Silver Lily would be nothing for her. In a strange way, it might even be fitting. Mother Meiko had invited me to come in the first place, after all.
That evening I nursed my resentments as carefully as any babe at the breast. I will show them! I could free the children in the thrall of the Beggar Caste, race to the harbor to confront the most corrupt captains, fly over the curled and pointed rooftops of this city in search of some crime so foul that my redressing it would bring undeniable credit on the temple, along with the sweet revenge of my repudiation. Or perhaps just slink away into the night, leaving them to question where they had wronged me and wonder what had become of me.
In the end, I did what I always did these days. I slipped into my blacks and walked out a side door of the temple. Sometimes my trips to the docks were more about the drinking than the listening.
This was one of those nights.
______
I had a month to make up my mind, so naturally I spent the next few weeks declining to think about the problem at hand. My days and nights were full enough, and I suppose I must have believed the Goddess would move me somehow. The needle on the compass of my purpose had been spinning for a while.
Down along the Avenue of Ships, in the middle of a warm, rainy Wednesday, which happened to be the Festival of Coal Demons, the Goddess spoke to me again. I did not feel Her presence as I had in the past, but there was no mistaking the furred, rangy shape that stepped through the crowd near me.
A Stone Coast pardine.
I had never seen one of that race here in Selistan. Sometimes the Lily Goddess made Her will known through unlikely chance.
As I took a few strides more, I realized this was the Dancing Mistress. Only strongly drilled habit kept me moving when I wanted to stop and stare. She was bare-handed and barefooted, wore a light toga of some open-weave fabric, and carried a satchel over her shoulder—almost as she’d looked back in Copper Downs, except dressed for our weather.
I brushed past her, close enough to touch. Her pace faltered as if she’d noticed me, but I was clothed as Neckbreaker, not to mention three years older and taller than when last she’d seen me. The small riot of beggars and children who jostled in her wake kept her moving, or she might have turned to stare.
At least, so I fancied.
What is she doing here?
I took half a dozen more steps. Then I rounded a bollard, using our distance to keep her from noticing. I could follow this woman far better than she could follow me. Especially on these streets. With the Coal Demon festival in full swing, there were firecarts everywhere, people in blackface or redface, and vertical firepots of glazed terra cotta at almost every corner, burning even now with their rain chimneys on.
She was a canny woman, perhaps the most so I’d ever met, but this chaos would defeat her. At least so long as she was new to the city.
The Dancing Mistress must be new to Kalimpura, I realized. Else I’d have heard tell of her in the taverns. Possibly even as gossip in the temple. When one of the Red Men of the fire lakes had come to the city in the cool season, they had talked of nothing else at table for days.
For a pardine, they would gossip a whole season long.
I followed, watching the crowd that surrounded her. She walked as one did in Copper Downs, as if one’s business was one’s own and there could be an expectation of privacy. I recalled the shoving, crowded madness of my arrival here, before I had learned to move among the Kalimpuri. I further recalled how little the Dancing Mistress liked to be touched.
They were plucking at her fur, by the Goddess. I almost began to laugh. No one here had seen her claws, certainly, or watched her teeth bare as she worked through the angry hurt of a bad throw or a low blow.
She tried to step around the statue of Mahachelai on his Horse of Skulls, keeping the plinth close to her left hand. Two of the smaller beggar children slid between the Dancing Mistress’ thigh and the granite base. She kicked them away, and they began to squeal.
I immediately recognized the Broken Wing. It was a beggar’s takedown, which rarely worked on sailors or soldiers, but was sometimes effective on traders or captains in the company of their wives. Those unfortunates could not show the flint in their hearts with their women at their sides, and so while one child squalled and pretended to have been hurt by the horse or carriage, the other quickly insisted on a small sum to see his sibling home without trouble, otherwise the militia would be here quite soon, begging the master’s pardon.
That Kalimpura had no militia—and no particular interest in maintenance of the public order as the Stone Coast understood the idea—was not something that every traveler knew in the moment of confronting a frightened, crying child. Some of the little ones in the Beggar Caste were so good that I’d seen the Broken Wing run through to the payoff even when the touch had spotted the initial dive.
The Dancing Mistress made the mistake of turning and kneeling to see what she had done. I pushed forward through the crowd, growling from behind my mask, just as a cutpurse plucked at the satchel on her arm. She whirled, and blood spattered.
The claws were out.
Drawing my pigsticker, I ran toward her. I had to stop her before she killed one of these beggars, or the other citizens stepping into the fray like the fools that they were.
If they lost their lives on my blade, it would be a matter for negotiation. If they lost their lives at her hands . . .
There were too many backs in the way, too many bobbing heads. I scrambled up a big man’s shoulders as he cursed me. In that moment, I had forgotten that I was masked and in black. No one but me knew I was a Blade.
“Out, away,” I roared, my voice screeching far too high to gain their attention. I jumped past my perch and onto a woman, knocking her down and me with her. Her neighbor in the crowd saw my knife and wiggled away as I regained my feet.
The Dancing Mistress was clinging to one of the Skull Horse’s legs, swinging a stick she had not been carrying moments before. I thanked the Goddess and the tulpas of my lost home that she hadn’t snatched a blade. Still, there was blood and people screaming for more blood. The Death Right could yet be at issue.
With fists and elbows, I fought through to her. A pair of toughs from the Street Guild were closing on the Dancing Mistress. I popped one of them behind the ear with a stiff-fingered jab. He stumbled backwards, howling. She tried to kick the other away, but caught him in the throat and soft under-part of the jaw with her foot claws.
His skin tore open in an impressive spray of blood. His fellow grabbed at me. I turned, blocked a stab from a dagger, then drove my own knife into his gut. The tough went down for good that time, vomiting blood and bile. The other staggered as people around us panicked. Those in the front tried to push backwards while those behind tried to push forward.
I grabbed at her wrist and called out in Petraean, “With me, with me.”
Though there was the light of battle in her eyes, the Dancing Mistress responded to the words. She jumped down onto the two bodies, one still moving and groaning, and shouted,“Where?”
Pointing ahead, I charged with elbows and knife butt flying. People moved quickly enough.
She followed.
Our saving grace would be that the street was so crowded with festival traffic. The entire screaming mess of the riot had probably gone unnoticed twenty paces away. I shoved and prayed, counting on the Dancing Mistress to remain close on my heels.
What I didn’t count on was the mass of children following us, shrieking about violence and the Death Right. I was certain that the Street Guild man whom I’d stabbed was dead. The other likely so, and him by the Dancing Mistress’ hand.
I was protected from the Death Right, but she was not. If a child with any family of substance had been hurt as well, her fate was probably sealed.
Realizing what
I was thinking, I nearly dropped to my knees in disgust. Children. Whom I’d spent so much time claiming to worry about and fear for. How easy it was to see them as an obstacle, an inconvenience, when they were not of my own accounting.
Ahead of us, a writhing line of coal demons chased a fire snake. I turned with bared blade and shifted the Dancing Mistress past me. I showed the mob of children the bloody edge. “Get away from the docks,” I screamed at them in Seliu, “before any more of the child-takers come!”
That was a stupid lie, but it gave them pause. A moment was all I needed. “Keep close!” I shouted in Petraean. The snake dodged and twisted right before us in a clash of gongs, spewing nose-searing red and orange vapors from censers dangling below his frills. Underneath, a line of sweating, nearly naked men worked poles and spun back and forth on their heels. They were a storm of legs and wood, with the crowd pressed skin-close on the other side.
This was the woman who’d taught me how to move. I moved. With a quick tumble and a screamed apology, I slipped between two of the snake dancers. The Dancing Mistress was so close behind me that she must have slipped between the next two. I heard an angry shout, but already a twelve-foot coal demon roared and vomited black smoke amid the crashing of his gongs.
Shoulder first, I pressed into the next part of the crowd. These people were a shift from one of the green-wallah houses, for the group of them smelled of garlic and onions. Not so much different from lily bulbs, I thought, and wondered if the Goddess had sent them.
I wasn’t concerned now about whether the Dancing Mistress could follow me. She still was my superior in the art of swift, graceful economy of motion. I was worried that some ripple of outrage would pursue us both, even through the snake. The street was a peculiar thing, and rumor traveled by strange paths.
While I could slip away easily enough, it would be impossible to deny her part in the fighting.
Amid a hail of firecrackers, with their red-and-gold flurry of shredded paper and stink of pouther, we slid into an alleyway. Though the din was magnified here by the confined space between the walls, there was no one with us.
