by Jay Lake
“We all bent to the whims of a master we could not withstand,” I said. “I meant to set myself free, thinking that would free us all.” I passed my hands over the black and the white. The candles warmed my palms. “I am sorry for what became of you, each and every one.”
The air swirled close. For a moment I thought the Lily Goddess was upon me, but it was just the wind rising and snatching away the flames. Then I realized I was done.
“When will we go before the Interim Council?” I asked her.
“Soon. Word will come, perhaps as early as tomorrow.”
“I would take a good meal and rest my feet. We can go Below this afternoon or this evening, as you see best.”
“Come,” she said. “I know where to find stewed rabbits with corn and peppers.”
I followed her to a meal I was more than pleased to eat.
At dusk we clambered the high wall that blocked the minehead and its tailings from the view of the wealthy who populated the Velviere District. Within the brambled, jumbled space we located the shaft entrance and descended Below by a long creaking ladder.
Once down, we didn’t run as in the old days. We walked carefully with weapons loose in hand, coldfire pressed tight between our fingers. I understood this—we would not draw attention. It seemed a false economy. People saw best with their eyes. Most of what lived Below saw with noses and ears and stranger senses.
The Dancing Mistress did not lead with purpose, either. She murmured occasional warnings, guiding me onward.
I let my senses explore the dark. It was noisy here, in a way I had not remembered from the Below of my earlier days. Kalimpura was loud beneath the stones, but that was more a matter of Below there being a sewer system and thus well supplied with inlets serving to conduct sound. Given our climb down that ladder, we were a good fifty feet beneath the streets. Far beneath the sewers and into the mine galleries.
Old machines loomed, something else I had not encountered before. Rust and corrosion and the faint whiff of stale oil hung heavy in the air. My nose also found stone, of course, and standing water. Wood long gone to rot. Stray breezes. Flesh, but not nearby. My ears echoed with footfalls and odd clatters, but they were directionless phantoms. Threat was everywhere and nowhere.
I thought I had seen the Factor. Was he present in his persona as the Duke as well? The dead ruler had been more like an actor with two roles than a man with two homes. I was not even sure who knew of their commonality.
What of his agents? There had been other undying beneath the Duke’s spell. I’d met two the day I slew him. Not to mention all the guards and functionaries.
We continued to move slowly. My sense of threat was almost overwhelming now. More than generalized dread—I was under attack. I let my pace fade and risked a whisper. “What is it?”
“I do not know,” the Dancing Mistress answered quietly. The edge of fear in her voice chilled my blood.
“Not a ghost . . .” My words were cut off as something immediately before me shrieked with all the pain of a demon-culled soul.
I swung my blade wide even as my ears flooded with something hot and viscous. The edge caught on nothing. My hearing was blocked, which frightened me immensely. I opened my left hand with its small scoop of coldfire and nearly screamed.
The Dancing Mistress was sliding past me on my off side, away from my blade. She faced even farther left, as if she expected something to burst out of the dark there. Directly before me was a very tall imperfectly shaped man who had no skin. I saw bone and glistening fat and the strange marbled stripes of muscles. His eye sockets were empty, but even so his face was pointed directly at me.
Worst of all, my knife should have touched him.
I swung again. The knife passed through without intersecting his body. A bony muscle-wrapped hand caught me hard in the left temple.
Spinning back on my right heel, I had a moment to think how unfair this was, that he could hit me but I could not hit him, when the Dancing Mistress let fly a screeching cry of her own. All I saw between the shifting shadows and the tears of pain clouding my eyes was a leaping shape. Then I heard a horrid, tearing thump.
She’d attacked him bare-handed, I realized. This one could not be touched with weapons.
My hands lacked claws, but I could still use them well enough. I dropped my knife and charged head-down into the fight. When I hit, the feeling was like striking an open wound. Just grease and thick, slow blood, and nothing to grab on to.
My eyes were not filled with tears, I realized. I was being blinded by a flow of blood from my eyelids and nostrils. No sight, no smell, no hearing, except through a bubbling distance that did nothing to disguise the Dancing Mistress’ shriek of enraged pain.
I head-butted again. This time something cracked. We had finally met one of the “worse things” the Dancing Mistress had promised me so long ago.
Strength, I prayed in a single syllable, then lunged once more. Blinded by darkness and blood, I clawed at the cold mess of this creature until my fingers snagged on bone. I threw my weight backwards and yanked hard as I could.
The piece I gripped stretched away, then snapped back. Our attacker gave another great shriek. I heard the Dancing Mistress’ muffled shout of my name, then utter silence.
I stood with legs spread for a balanced stance, my hands high and ready for a strike.
Nothing.
Spitting blood, I listened with my mouth open. An old trick.
Nothing.
Carefully I lowered my left hand and touched my face. No blood. My hearing cleared with a faint popping noise. No blood there, either. Only my hands were sticky with the ichor of that shambling horror.
I listened until I ached.
Nothing.
The thing was gone, and the Dancing Mistress gone with it. Or dead.
My coldfire had been wiped out of my left hand with the fight, all but the faintest smear. I lowered myself to the ground and carefully felt across mossy stone until I found my blade. I then turned around and scraped back and forth in the dark until I found walls on both sides of me. Open space stretched in front of me.
There was nothing here.
Frustration boiled into anger. I opened my mouth to shriek, and nearly passed out. Lying on the stones gasping, I realized this was the feeling that came after a wound had bled too much. Yet I was whole.
The thing has forced my blood from me, then fed on it.
That realization made me retch. I’d prefer an honest slash to this rape.
Light flickered ahead. The pale gleam of coldfire in someone’s hand. Staggering to my feet, I held my blade behind me so it would not shine. I half closed my eyes for the same reason.
Whoever came moved slowly and breathed loudly. I waited patient as stone. They approached with care, until I could see they were human, or at least human shaped. My breathing was so shallow, it had virtually paused.
The stranger stopped two paces away. Summoning what little strength I had, I stepped so close, we could have kissed—and set my blade at his throat.
“Who are you?” I growled, ready to slit at a moment.
“H-have you seen a god here?”
By all the demons of far Avedega, I knew that voice. “Septio?” I whispered.
“Yes.”
I could hear him getting angry. I could smell it. “That skinless freak was yours?”
He pushed the blade away. I did not fight. “What happened?” he demanded. “Who are you?”
“I am Green. And your . . . thing . . . has stolen away my Dancing Mistress.” Just saying the words made me want to plunge my knife into his gut. I withheld my hand.
He must have heard my desire in my tone, for the bluff was gone from his voice when he answered. “Then she will be lucky if she dies quickly. An avatar of Blackblood has slipped our nooses and gone hunting.”
That sounded horrifying. “What happens when it finds its prey?”
“Eventually it returns to the god.”
“Break the W
heel!” I cursed. “How do we rescue her?”
His answer was chillingly simple. “We don’t.” Then: “Green. You do not sound well. Let us find a quiet place and talk about what it is that may be done.”
“Qu-quiet, yes.” I managed to put my knife away without stabbing my thigh. I very badly wanted to sit down, in safety.
She was gone. My greatest teacher was gone. A sick emptiness took everything good and right within me as I followed close behind this priest who might once have been my friend.
I kept enough sense of direction, even in my upset, to know that we were heading for the Temple Quarter. Goddess, protect me from Your sisters and brothers here.
Septio led me slowly to a colony of coldfire, for I could not walk fast. This time we both took plentiful swaths in hand. Somewhere in the darkness, we’d left behind the mine gallery with its corroded, bulking machines. Now the gleaming silver light showed a wealth of carvings. Faces and forms crowded the stone from the floor all the way up to and across the ceiling. The details of their features were wrapped in soft shadow, melting and flowing as we walked. Gnomons, for the dark-bound sundial of the underworld.
I let them distract me from the cracked well of my grief.
The Blood Fountain had originally been built much the same way. Kalimpura had entire temples in a similar style, buildings where every exposed face had been carved in a frenzied riot of detail.
I could not see why such a great effort would be made to line a tunnel few knew the existence of.
Eventually we found a tall, cold room lit by spitting gas lamps. Though it was at the level of the tunnel, the gas told me we were in the undercellar of some building of the Temple Quarter. How deep did the clever architecture go?
I found myself focusing on the smallest details as a distraction from my grief. This room had eight sides of equal length, making the floor an even octagon about twelve feet across. The corners where the sides met were relieved with little projections that rose the thirty feet to the ceiling to form a blunted vault. The walls were rimed with frost, as was the floor. A sigil was etched in marble beneath the frost.
Each wall held a doorway of blank stone. We had entered through the only opening. Septio stepped to the middle of the room. “Join me.”
I did so. He shut his eyes, so I shut mine. I had the sudden sense of something larger and meaty close by us, though it did not have the blind, questing hunger of the skinned thing that had taken the Dancing Mistress. I clenched my fists and stood firm beside the priest, unready to surrender anything more.
His arm brushed mine. “Come.”
The doors had moved. Stone blocked the path where our footprints disturbed the frost on the floor, and the opening now beckoned over virgin rime.
“Dread magic,” I asked, “or a slowly rotating floor?”
Septio gave me a sour look. “Follow where the road leads, Green.”
“I have spent too much time in a temple, and among practical women.” The Dancing Mistress had been one, of course. The greatest of them. My eyes stung with the thought of her.
We passed through the darkness into a room almost as tall as the octagonal chamber, but longer, and thus relatively more narrow in aspect. This one was ranked by stands of dark candles, some deep brown beeswax. As we entered, the tapers flared to life to form a wave of light that reached the far end of the room and bloomed off the hammered silver mirror on that wall. The floor was littered with rugs and cushions and bolsters. A low table holding a few trays and bowls sat at the middle of the room amid the brightest candles.
“Come,” said Septio. “Sit. Let us talk in a safe and peaceful place.”
I watched the mirror as we moved to the center of the room. The reflection was delayed slightly, the way an echo might dally to follow after a noise. I had never known light to do that, and wondered what glamer was on the mirror. Or possibly on me.
“Below has not been good to me lately,” I said as I sat beside the table. Something among the bowls had an interesting aroma. My body, starved for blood, began to hunger for it. I felt guilt at the hunger, as if my need were a betrayal of my lost mistress.
Septio tucked himself down next to me, not touching but still quite close, and reached for one of the bowls. “Try this.”
“How will it help me find her?” I demanded. Or her corpse.
“Trust me in this. You need your strength, and we have time.”
I did not trust him, but neither did I have much choice. Finely shredded meat in a very dark sauce. I lifted some with my fingers and tasted. Salty and rich, with a jolt of spice I would not have thought to find in Stone Coast cooking.
It was a balm to my thinned blood.
Dropping my veil, I began to eat. It was difficult not to make noises as I tore into the food. I felt like a beggar outside a bakery, driven half-mad by the scent and stuffing myself on the scraps before someone took the tray away.
After a few minutes, I slowed myself. There was no reason to lose control in front of this man, even if I did half-count him as a friend. “Now I have trusted you. Tell me, where is she?”
“I told you. With the avatar.”
“And you said rescue was not possible for me. It happens I believe you, or I’d already be destroying this room looking for the way out to find her.” An empty boast, though sitting in a decent amount of warmth and safety was doing much to restore me from the assault. “You led me to believe there might be other paths.” I leaned so close that the warmth of his face mingled with mine. “Tell me now,” I growled.
“That depends upon the god’s aspect.” Septio’s voice was low to match mine. “Skinless is not a theopomp, so it will not lay her directly before the altar. She will be held awhile.”
“Safely, or in pain and fear?”
“Green, what sort of god do we follow here?”
I exploded. “Why? Why do you honor such a cheap storybook villain? Life is difficult enough without mortifying yourself before a monster!”
“Do you know what we do here? Do you know why?”
“No,” I admitted.
“Then do not criticize. The Sundering of Heaven was a stroke that has echoed across all of the world’s time.”
“You refer to theogenic dispersion.” Sundering of Heaven. I despised his cant. The Temple of the Silver Lily seemed to have managed largely without the mummery so often associated with priests and gods. Simple description had been enough.
“Yes.” Septio was surprised. “It is easier to talk of sundering, for most people.”
I grabbed a lock of his brown, curling hair and yanked him close. “I am not most people. I will grant you that your god is a liver-eater worthy of your respect. Grant me that I know something of what I am doing.”
“You have changed much during your time away, Girl,” he breathed, then kissed me.
For one shocked moment I sat with his lips upon mine. Though he was clean-shaven, his face bristled. His presence was an electrick prickle on me.
Then I came to myself, pulled back, and landed an open-handed blow upon Septio’s cheek. “I am not your harlot!” I shouted.
A long silence followed, which almost tilted into something more. Or less.
“Now where is she?”
“W-we must see the Pater Primus ab-bout the Dancing Mistress,” he finally said. “But I would know some things first.”
“Will she be broken or consumed?”
“N-not until the theopomp takes her up.”
“Who is the theopomp?”
His smile was crooked and bloody. “I am.”
“You bastard,” I hissed in Seliu.
“N-no, no.” His hands fluttered like birds to draw a hawk from their nestlings. “There is a labyrinth. The avatar will be a while passing through it. I can do nothing until it emerges. With luck, she will not recall the journey.”
“Why the focus on pain?” I asked again, distracted.
He sat up and dabbed at his face with a length of damask strewn on the floor. “You
follow a southern god, yes?”
“Goddess.”
“A women’s temple?”
“Yes.” I wondered where he was bound with this. I did not want him so close to the Lily Goddess, even with mere words. Not if there truly had been god-killers in this city sometime in the recent past.
“Does she take up the pain of birth? Of illness, or the death of a mother? The death of a child?”
“Well . . .” I had always supposed She must, but we never celebrated pain there except in the special way the Blades sometimes had of sharing love and hurt in the same moments. “Hopes and fears, yes.”
“Your pain is as powerful as any prayer. Likewise the cripple, or the child who tumbles down a staircase, or a draft horse with a broken leg and the man with the sledgehammer not there yet to end it.” He gasped, his breath shuddering. “Blackblood takes that in, along with the death cries of the prey in the field and the sheep in the pen, and much else that washes the world. My god’s mercies are extreme, but they are mercies nonetheless.”
“So death is his demesne?”
“No, not death. There are dust-dry temples tended by men wrapped in yards and yards of yellowing cloth who offer homage to what passes on the other side of life. Suffering is of this world. Death is of the next.”
“They are almost the same,” I protested.
“You have the right of it. Sometimes they are almost the same.” His smile was sickening. “We celebrate pain as a way of celebrating life. When you can no longer feel the scourge, you are beyond this world.”
I shook my head. “I suppose there is someone like him in Kalimpura, but I never passed within temples other than my own.” These priests are crazed, I thought. Like one who lusts for the pain of the lash so much, she hurts and kills to feel it.
“Gods are rarely pleasant. Even the smiling queens of the harvest have the blood of a murdered king somewhere beneath the soil of their fields.”
“We still possess a measure of grace.”
“That is why men are greater than gods.” Something in his voice caught at me. “We can know grace, and knowing grace, pass beyond. Even the gods themselves are not blessed with souls. When they die, it is forever.”
