by Jay Lake
Goddess, have a mercy for their souls, if it is not too late, I prayed. These people do not follow the Wheel as they do in Your south, but there must be some balm for them.
The rain fell on me like a benediction. My hair was plastered to my head. It felt as if the Goddess’ hand were pressing down on me. I listened for a long time to see if She would guide my heart. She told me nothing that I wanted to hear. That silence meant more than words might have been able to say.
“It is my doing,” I finally said, wiping the bile from my mouth. My heart felt ground to shattered glass. “I wrought this.”
The Dancing Mistress knelt before me. “Green. We know now that the Duke created this disaster, in his guise as the Factor. He set men to guard these girls as if they were treasures out of legend, and treated the guardians harshly. The girls were doomed the moment he was gone. If someone else had done the deed, you would have met your end as well.”
“I did it,” I repeated stupidly. Killed them all, with a few words.
“They died.” Her voice was hard now. “With and of the Duke. Come now, we must move on. Nothing is for you here.”
She was right, though my legs protested. Whatever I might have found in the rooms of the Pomegranate Court had been wiped out by fire and weather since those first days of riot and blood. Perhaps that was just as well, I thought. The ghosts I could meet down there would be very unpleasant.
I was too upset to climb down the drain. The Dancing Mistress led me to the main gate and a little stair choked with leaves and debris but still passable. We descended into a narrow alley that must once have given access from the street to the blank-faced central tower.
Looking up, I tried to imagine the men who had lived there. How they had thought, felt, why they had taken the lives of so many girls and women with such pain. I knew what sort of men they were. Like the four who had tried to rob me of my purse today. Not the elegant guardians who’d ridden blindfolded with the Factor’s coach, but angry brutes who believed their strength made them right.
What did men like that think would happen to them as they grew old and frail? To their wives and children? Did the world only ever belong to the strong?
The tally of my dead had just more than doubled, with the women and girls of the Factor’s house to my account.
I realized the Dancing Mistress was plucking at my arm. “We go Below now,” she said. “It will be good to be out of the rain.”
“It is just water.” I tried to smile. “I’ve been told that washes away sin.”
“My people do not believe in sin.” Her voice was serious. “There is only circumstance, and choice. Green, you had neither circumstance nor choice when great harm befell this place.”
I nodded, because that was what she expected. As we turned toward the street, something caught my eye. I looked back toward the blank-walled central tower. Someone stood there, half-hidden in the pouring rain.
Tapping the Dancing Mistress’ arm in battle code for rapid reconnaissance, I sprinted toward the figure.
I heard her curse, and realized I’d used a signal of the Lily Blades. Which she would not know. Still, she would follow.
Whoever it was seemed to retreat as I approached. At the same time, they did not move at all. I burst through a swirling curtain of rain to find the Factor—the Duke—standing in the shattered doorway of the tower. The skin of his face was as gray as his rotten clothes. He appeared surprised to see me, then backed into the shadows with one hand raised before him.
He was gone.
The Dancing Mistress caught up to me. “What?”
Shivering, I found my voice. “The Factor was just here.” And why not? “He was dead long before I slipped your words within his ear, Mistress. Surely he still is.”
Like a god, I realized. Ghosts and gods were not so far apart. Especially as the greatest part of their power came from how much a person believed. As with tulpas?
“A glamer.” She touched my face, peering into my eyes in the graying light of the rainy afternoon.
Staring up at the blank bluestone rising between the closing walls of this gateway, I was inclined to agree with her.
Over the next few days, the Dancing Mistress and I visited different parts of the city. I wanted to see Copper Downs by daylight, without riot on my heels. I wanted to understand more of what there was here. At the same time, we set about purchasing various neccessities with her recently procured funds.
“I cannot put the Interim Council off long,” she told me. “Only Federo’s absence has allowed me to avoid them more than a day.”
“Where is he?” We were down in the Dockmarket eating a watery northern curry of some lumpy squash mixed with stewed fowl. I thought these Petraeans should be barred from using the word curry to describe it, even if someone had waved masala powder near the pot as they thought about cooking it.
“Off on an embassy chasing after help to fight Choybalsan.”
“Houghharrow or Dun Cranmoor?”
“Would that it were so. No, he makes a circuit of fishing villages and farming towns. The other cities of the Stone Coast have yet to take this bandit seriously. Federo is begging his spearmen in tens and twenties from little men with little troubles who cannot see past their own bend in the road.”
“A pretty problem,” I said. “But not mine. I would still prefer to hide my face a while longer, in case anyone has a particularly keen memory or a thirst for old vengeance.”
My ship-made blacks were wearying, the wrong texture and weight for my comfort. I would owe the Dancing Mistress a double hand of silver taels for the new ones she ordered for me.
While we waited for my purchases to be ready, we quartered the streets. The Dancing Mistress showed me the compound where she had met a shaman in the days after the Duke’s fall. She told me the story of how she and a Hunt of her people had run him to the ground.
“More of our magic on the loose,” she said sadly. “A forerunner of this Choybalsan.”
I did not sense any stirrings of either the divine or the profane as we passed through the little squatter village beneath the willows of the long-abandoned estate.
So it was. I saw granaries and slaughterhouses and the five armories around the city and streets full of the most ragged poor—they did not call themselves beggars here—as well as the quiet boulevards surrounding the high-walled gates of wealth. We walked the docks, for there was no single Avenue of Ships here as in Kalimpura. We passed by warehouses, factories, bourses, markets, exchanges, moneylenders, public strong rooms, and all the appurtenances of commerce on which a great city must run. Likewise the slips where ships were built and refitted, the parks, the rubbish heaps, the old mineheads now walled in and nearly forgotten, and the Ducal Palace from the outside.
I felt like a traveler coming back to his own home for the first time. Neither was true here, of course—I was no mere traveler, and while this city had been my residence a long while, it was never my home.
Perhaps most odd, all the traveling and talking of places and names made me long for my belled silk. More understandably, at night my empty sheets made me wish for a woman’s arms and a place where I might be whipped freely and in safety.
“Where do women find one another here?” I asked the Dancing Mistress as we walked down the Street of Advocates.
“Wherever they are, I suppose.”
“No, I mean for sport. If a woman desires to be scourged, or loved, by another woman, where does she go?”
“I am not sure.”
The Dancing Mistress was embarrassed. I laughed at her, and began making it my business to catch the eye of the tougher women I met. Some looked back with a certain glint, to be sure, but I would need to work out the safe approach for these people and this place.
I had not appreciated what riches of sisterhood the Lily Blades had offered until they were lost to me.
Changing the subject, I said, “I have seen a few of Choybalsan’s posters, but mostly what they tell me is that this
bandit king has a friend with a printing press. The city is fallen on hard times, but nothing desperate.”
“Times will be desperate soon,” she said. “Did you see this morning’s broadsheets when we passed the bookseller on Finewire Street? Choybalsan’s men have broken the altars at the Temple of Air in the Eirigene Pass.”
I knew more of Stone Coast geography than I really cared for, thanks to my lessoning. “That would put him less than three days’ ride from Copper Downs, should he come down the Barley Road by horse.”
“Yes. Have you noticed all the lading down at the docks is onto ships? Almost nothing comes off.”
I thought about that for a moment. “Yes, I did, but I do not recognize the significance.”
“Lading is work for the longshoremen and dock idlers either way. Yet if one sits in a seat of government, that is terrible bad news. There are quiet men with account books who will lecture you about balance of trade. Even the broadsheets talk of it now. In years past, you could not get most Petraeans to understand why money is not the same the world over. Hard times make for sharp thinking.”
“Why have the people not fled?”
“Some have.” She shrugged. “Others . . . where would they go? It is a hard road overland to either Lost Port or Dun Cranmoor. There are not many berths aboard ships. People stay, scavenge wood scraps to board their windows, and hope they have enough coal and potatoes to last if the markets are shut down for a while.”
“And no ghosts,” I replied. “I have not felt a prickle of the spell of release that I spoke. No strange power of any sort since spying the Factor’s glamer the first day. If we do not find wisdom in the Temple Quarter, I think we must again go Below.”
Even from a distance, the houses of the gods were clearly in disarray. Broken domes were visible from halfway across the city. The gods might have stirred from their long silence, but they hadn’t yet concerned themselves with matters architectural.
Closer in, the Dancing Mistress pointed out to me the fat iron posts scattered along the east curb of Pelagic Street, which bounded the west edge of the Temple Quarter. “For many years, no one passed within except the consecrated, the very brave, and the foolishly suicidal. Offering boxes were set here for such temples as remained active through the Duke’s reign. People slipped their money in, or hung bags of food for the priests. Sometimes they even prayed. No one crossed a temple door without good reason.”
I remembered Septio from our underground runs. He had been a strange young man, not much older than myself, who had hinted at rivalries and jealousies among the priests who served his god Blackblood.
“Why were they so dangerous?”
“Were?” She laughed as we passed a building faced in slick black tiles. A pair of rusted iron doors stood open, much too tall. “They are more dangerous now. Better organized. In the quiet times, there were—well, tulpas perhaps.”
“Mother Iron and the like?”
“Yes. What do you suppose happens to the dreams of a silent god?”
I considered that. “They might walk into the world, if the god were great enough.”
“Exactly.”
As opposed to someone from the world walking into a dream, as her people did from time to time. “It is tempting to wonder if our world itself is the dream of an even greater mind.”
“As I recall,” she said in her teaching voice, “Mistress Danae had you read Gnotius. That was one of his favorite ideas.”
“Gnotius believed he himself was a dream, Mistress. I am not so sure he passed such judgment on the world, as he did not trust in its existence outside his own mind. That mind was what he doubted.”
She laughed. “Now you know why I instructed you in dance and defense, not philosophy.”
We drifted to a halt before a wide boulevard that drove back into the Temple Quarter. It was lined with great, fat-bellied iron pots, each of which hosted a thin sapling. The pots looked as if they could once have been used to boil sacrifices in some rougher, earlier age. Some were broken open by gnarled old roots that reached down into the pavers beneath, showing that great trees had once grown here.
Temples and priories and more anonymous buildings stood on each flank of the road. I realized this quarter was a small city in its own right. We’d walked past it on all four sides, without ever quite coming this close to it before. The Temple Quarter extended for blocks and blocks. From here, it seemed to have an endless depth.
“The Street of Horizons,” the Dancing Mistress said. “So called, I’m told, because it runs forever.”
“Or at least eleven blocks,” I said, working the city-math out as we spoke.
“Yes, but can you see where it exits the quarter?”
I could not. Which really was the point. “Some old glamer?”
“That, or a very clever bit of architecture.”
That was easy to answer. “If we walk this road running almost due east, we should exit the quarter once more.”
“Of course. The architecture is not that clever.”
I headed down the Street of Horizons. The Dancing Mistress followed close behind. She was letting me find my own way. If I could have smelled magic, I knew it would be reeking here like a building after a fire. Whatever the Lily Goddess had feared might be visible in some fashion. Surely the gods knew one another’s spoor, even across the ocean. Their sight ran farther than that of men, whatever one thought of their wisdom.
That borderline blasphemy in mind, I found the temples crowded together like people in a market. In a Copper Downs market, I corrected myself. If they’d been crowded in the Kalimpuri fashion, they would have built literally one on top of the other. There were few common walls. Divine power apparently needed empty air to serve for insulation here in the chilly north.
Where most of the districts of Copper Downs had a style—reflecting either function, as in the warehouses down by the docks, or form, as in the counting houses along Redwallet Street and elsewhere in the financial areas—the temples enjoyed no unifying architecture. Each reflected the needs or nature of their gods. Gods being what they were, that meant the needs and nature of their worshippers.
The Street of Horizons was no longer abandoned, but it was still very quiet. Small groups of people shuffled to and from the demands of their religions. A man with a donkey cart wandered slowly in pursuit of what little trash was strewn on this road. Three young men with shaven heads led a protesting pig on a long leather leash to some sacrifice.
Little enough happened here. I wondered when these temples saw the bulk of their foot traffic. Dawn services? Was there a Petraean holy day? My readings under Mistress Danae had told stories of every possible combination of sacrament and dedication.
“How many people here worship regularly?” I asked.
“The priests complain of this often,” she told me. “There will need to be a generation born without fear of this place before they see the crowds this street was built to host. People sidle in and out as they find the need, but in Copper Downs, the impulse to divinity is still a very private matter.”
“As it is for your people,” I said.
“We do not worship,” the Dancing Mistress said.
“I know. You follow a path.”
“Yes.” She sounded somewhat miffed, as if I’d stolen a secret. “Worship requires a soul to hunger for the divine.”
I doubted the distinction was so clear and simple, but I would not challenge her. Instead I kept walking, and wondered where the gods were. They did not come out to see me, whatever business they might have been about since their awakening.
If anyone in Copper Downs had recognized the taint of the Duke upon me, I might have thought it one of the gods. While I could not smell magic, they surely could.
Not this day, however.
We found the other end of the eleven blocks without incident. I felt no tickle nor tremble. Nothing. No gods, no ghosts, no in-between northern tulpas.
I was strangely disappointed. Whatever the Lily Go
ddess had hearkened to, it wasn’t here. Of course, the coils of the Dancing Mistress’ heart didn’t twine through this most human of quarters in Copper Downs. Foreigners and nonhumans were to be found all over this city, but not in the Temple Quarter.
“Nothing,” the Dancing Mistress said in that way she had of continuing conversations we had not actually been having.
“I might as well have been touring the bourses and looking at the corn bids.”
“We did that yesterday,” she said.
At that I had to laugh. Yet the lack of any response here meant we would next seek underground. My ghostly trail of victims would far more easily find me in the darkness below than they would in the busy daylight up here.
“Before we go Below,” I told her, “I would like to make death offerings to the women of the Factor’s court.”
“That is not worship,” she observed.
“I know. I do not mean it to be. I have laid my ghosts that way since you and Federo first showed me the rite of the two candles.” Or tried to lay them, I thought.
We went looking for a wax chandler. The gods had said little enough to me. Perhaps my ghosts would say more. I wanted myself calm before I had to face them.
Half an hour later, the Dancing Mistress and I knelt together in a little grove of bay laurels in a plot of land near an old minehead incongruously located in the Velviere District. I carried lucifer matches with me, but was still quite glad that the sun was out. Autumn was at hand, but this was one of the pleasant days with which the Stone Coast could be blessed at the passing of summer.
I set out twelve black candles and twelve white. The Dancing Mistress had made no further comment at the purchase. I could not be sure how many women and girls had died in the Factor’s house. Probably no one knew to tell me. This number felt right.
One by one I lit them. They burned fitfully in the little breeze, but the trees gave us sufficient shelter to keep them alight. The candles gleamed and spat. I did not have a speaking in mind, but words came to me unbidden.
