Endurance (19 page)

“You were not so eager to have me gone before,” I told him in a hard, quiet voice. “Not when the city was at stake. You would never have brought down Federo and Choybalsan without me.”

“No. And do not think us ungrateful.” He leaned over the table. “But we cannot govern a city according to the whims of your enemies and the violence of your acts, Green. Life is settling. The troubles that dog us now follow you, not Copper Downs.”

“You had a goddess nearly slain in the Temple Quarter during the brass-ape races four summers past,” I told him. “Which was nothing to do with me. Despite the matter of Choybalsan, I do not set my targets so large, and would never care to meet the one who might try. Trade is unsettled, or you would not be seeing riots on the dock and yourself so busy and under duress. This city has not yet fully recovered from the death of the Duke. If it had, Councilor Johns would not have a place in this room.”

“That fool of a Factor trained you too well.” His reluctant smile belied his words. “But those are matters we will resolve. It is you who has small armies of assassins following you around.”

“Should I return to Kalimpura, then?”

“The High Hills were far enough away for me, frankly. At least there we knew where you were.” After a moment, Jeschonek added with rueful honestly, “And could find you at need.” He drummed the table again. “But here is my problem with you now. We bring our own enemies into being. When the Duke held the throne and kept all our politics and religion quiet, trade came to the city and little disrupted us. There has been more riot and trouble in the past four years since his fall than in the previous four centuries combined.

“You enter the city, and forces follow to oppose you. Green, I do not know
what
you are. Surely your tale is not yet fully told. God-touched, a storm of blades, or just a freakishly determined young woman, it does not matter. But your strength draws opposition. And that is what my city does not need.”

It is my city, too,
I wanted to say. This I had realized when speaking with the Dancing Mistress earlier. These people had bought me away from my father and my home, but they had also raised me to be one of them.

Councilor Kohlmann stepped into the room as I was considering my next words. I was glad enough it was not Lampet, for whom I already lacked patience. “Have you told her?” he asked Jeschonek.

We both spoke at once. “Told me what?” “I was doing so.”

Kohlmann gave me a long look. “It is clear to me that the Selistani embassy is a sham. They are only here for you. We cannot order them to leave, for we would be embarrassed of resources to compel them to our will. The council has voted to withdraw the protection offered to you before. You are charged instead with disposing of your personal matters without further harm to the city of Copper Downs.”

“These troubles belong to you, Green,” Jeschonek added. “You must take them away from our door.”

“You bastards,” I shouted, leaping to my feet with my short knife in hand. To their credit, neither man flinched. My blood boiled, but to what end? I slipped the weapon away, glaring at both of them as if my eyes could slice their skin. “You disgust me. I never mistook the Interim Council to be friendly to me, but my faith in our common interests was clearly misplaced.”

Kohlmann stepped back as I reached the door. He was afraid of me.
Good.
I gave him a flesh-rending smile. Even more hard words rolled in my head, but I kept them to myself and departed without further discussion. They did not trouble to call me back.

In the upper hallway, the clerks cowered. I had not realized we were so loud. When they cowered downstairs as well, I understood it was me that frightened them, not the shouting. I stalked out into Lyme Street, holding back tears that shamed me horribly.

Me.

Crying!

Not now, not for insults as foolish and petty as these.

But they were still bastards.

*   *   *

All I could do was walk off the tension. I needed to drain my anger before I could sensibly take further action. There was risk to me, and the ghost Erio had believed there to be risk to the city. Too many players, too many plots. I had to deal with the Selistani embassy, with the pardines, and with Blackblood's moves against me. The Interim Council would be no help. The next most obvious answer was to turn my enemies against one another.

But in my current state of agitation, I could not manage to conceive of a decent plan, let alone hope to carry it out.

I stomped toward the Dockmarket instead. Some piece of homely cheese might do me good. Likewise a crowd of indifferent people about their occasions, happy or sad as the mood took them, none bearing arms with my name written on the back of their hand. No one at the Dockmarket would care who or what I was. I could lose myself for an hour or two in their pressing mass, be distracted by chandlers or toymakers or weaponsmiths, then find myself sufficiently recovered to survey what must follow. At least the day was decent, a late gasp of autumn granting us all warm sun and clear skies without the knife-edged winter wind.

The Dockmarket was busy as ever. Trade might be down, but there were few vacant stalls. Tired old women hawked handfuls of trinkets from the tops of bollards. A clown juggled pigeons, tossing the birds like stones until they fluttered back into his hands. Fruitiers and greengrocers occupied wide spreads of stalls, their produce ranked in colorful arrays like a nursery paint box. Laughing children ran through the market clutching brown-spotted summer apples and thin coins stolen from the careless. I smelled food frying, flowers rotting, machine oil, spices, the acrid scent of blades being sharpened on a grinding wheel, the dung of a dozen kinds of animals. The sounds likewise made such a distraction. Blue-robed memory men squatting on the distorted faces of ancient, fallen idols chanted histories. Hogs bellowed their fear before the sledge took them in the skull. Chains jingled, babies shrieked, hammers fell.

This place was as close to the comforting chaos of Kalimpura as I was likely to find in Copper Downs. I slipped into the rhythms of the eddying crowds, falling into the habits of a Blade on a run—my stance, the set of my shoulders, how close I kept my weapons. Realizing this, I forced myself to relax. This was not the place of my enemies. The city of Copper Downs did not oppose me. Only some people in it, most of them foreigners.

I caught myself at that thought.
Selistani.
My own people were not foreigners.

Or were they?

A crowded space of split-log benches offered a chance for folk a-marketing to pause and consume the food they'd purchased, or rearrange the goods they'd bought. I slipped onto a sawn stump, glad for the respite. This was not the time for thinking, this was the time for clearing my head. But I needed a moment. At least the anger had subsided. Calm had not yet returned.

Though people were packed in here, the rest did me good. I'd been raised in isolation behind the Factor's bluestone walls. Even so, my years in Kalimpura had inured me to crowds. I looked up at the low, scattered clouds of the autumn sky and wondered how this market might appear to a bird overhead, or some weather god with a heaven's-eye view of the world. We would be as termites in their mound, laboring for our colorful scraps of food and cloth.

Something in that image comforted me. Kalimpuri were not so different from those of the Stone Coast, when viewed from far away.

My reverie was interrupted by a cry in Hanchu. I looked up to see a small elderly man being backed against the slats of a melon stall by half a dozen youths. The Dockmarket was not so dangerous, except perhaps for pickpockets, but these things sometimes happened. People pushed by without looking or stopping to help. It was unlikely anyone in authority would even happen along, let alone intervene.

To the Smagadine hells with that,
I thought. I had a soft spot for elderly Hanchu men, thanks to my time with Lao Jia, the old cook aboard
Southern Escape
who'd shown me such kindness when I first had fled Copper Downs after my slaying of the Duke.

I jumped to my feet, trotted over, and announced myself to the thugs by swiftly kicking two of them behind the knee, dropping the miscreants to the stinking cobbles mashed with rotten vegetables and animal dung. I showed the other four my short knives. “You will have a better day elsewhere,” I growled.

One opened his mouth to protest—or threaten—so I opened the muscles of his forearm. At the sight of blood, they scattered.

Turning to the old man I'd rescued, I tried to frame an apology in Hanchu. I paused a moment to take stock of what I saw. He wore a long buttoned cassock in a saffron-dyed cotton weave with turned-in seams, carefully wrought handwork from the look of it. Distinctive enough, but not the richly embroidered silk and cloth frog closures typical of the better class of Hanchu attire.

“Bid welcome,” I said in my limited, stumbling command of his language. “Take your ease.” Except for discussions of food and cooking, and certain expletives, that greeting nearly depleted my store of words.

“And well met,” he replied in Hanchu. Switching to accented Petraean, the old man continued, “We are lost in this marvelous city, and subject to the attentions of tasteless persons. You are foreign as well. Can you perhaps help direct us with more kindness than the last I asked?”

We
turned out to be the man I'd rescued and another small, elderly man who could have been his twin. No, I realized, the other man
was
his twin. They were matched, even to the point of holding their heads the same way—slightly cocked like a pair of wading birds stalking loaches in the reedy shallows. Looking back, I realize now the gods could not have sent me a sign more clear than that.

I ignored it with the self-assured folly of youth.

“My profound gratitude for the rescue,” the second brother said. “As well as the courtesy. Few here know our country or our language. Your people look inward, not outward.”

I turned the deep brown skin on the back of my hand toward them, and brushed it with the fingers of my other hand to draw attention to the color. “You have already seen that these are not my people, though I abide here. This is a land of pale folk with ideas that are sometimes pale as well.” I'd thought Federo a maggot-man when I met him, the very first of these northerners I'd ever laid eyes upon. “I would be pleased to aid you if I am able.”

“We have lost our way to Theobalde Avenue,” said the first brother.

“Your docks and market caught our eye too well,” added the second. “As did the louts who can be found here.”

Louts, indeed. I'd run into thugs a time or two. “I believe I know the way. Are you in haste?”

The first brother shook his head. A sly wit sparkled in his gaze. “Not now that we have your delightful company.”

The other caught the moment again. “You speak fairly. We shall play the old traveler's game and offer you a trade. My name is Iso, and this is my brother Osi.”

Osi smiled, as clever and secretive as his brother. “We are traveling mendicants.”

The words slipped back into his brother's mouth. “Our pilgrimage is longer than our lives will last, but we carry onward.”

The traveler's game was something I had only read of in old stories, though I understood that prisoners played it much the same way even now.

“I am Green,” I told them. “A girl—no, a woman—of Selistan, lately resident here in Copper Downs. In time I should think to return across the Storm Sea.”

Osi dipped his head. “I will give you this next thing. We confess that we knew who you were, though it was only chance that brought us to you in the market.”

He had given me a new piece of information, and now it was my turn to give him more if I would come to understand why they knew me. I did not feel under threat, but it was still a bit odd to realize that these two had been looking for me. “I was born in Selistan,” I said, “in the region of Bhopura.”
How do I get them to answer the question I want to ask?

Iso answered this time. They always spoke this way, I was to learn, like a volley between two shuttlecock players. He had to raise his voice above the whoop of several children nearby, but this did not seem to distress him. “We are on a journey to visit all the temples of the world, but we have not yet crossed the Storm Sea.”

That was an easy response. Perhaps I could drive this conversation back to my purposes. “I have crossed the sea three times, and so I am here today.”

Osi, quite promptly: “We have crossed many seas since we left the country of birth as well, along the Sunward Sea.”

That was far to the east, beyond the usual reach of Stone Coast shipping. Also nowhere near the Hanchu lands, which lay westward of here. The steam-kettle vessels that plied the ocean between the Stone Coast and Selistan were built along the Sunward Sea, though, where the arts of metallurgy and naval architecture and the mysteries of bottled lightning were much better understood. “I am no one to be known in this city,” I said. “For though I was largely raised here, I have never lived among its people.”

Iso replied, “You are known even to us, you who are a priestess of both a foreign god and a new one raised here in this place.”

Osi: “New gods are rare enough that the word spreads quickly to those who study such things.”

Maybe these men can help me find some wisdom to deal with Blackblood's ever more pressing claims.
“I have been within a few temples,” I said cautiously. “And spoken to more than one god directly. For all the good it's done me. But I am no priestess.”

“And we are no priests,” Iso said. “Still we have knelt before a hundred altars, and recited prayers in more languages than a man should be able to count.”

The market noise rose and fell around us like waves at the shore, but I was completely drawn in to these men and their traveler's game. “You have gone much farther than I. Home is all but lost to me, even here.” Especially after Kohlmann and Jeschonek had turned me away.