Endurance (24 page)

Mistakenly so, it seemed.

Putting my back into the makeshift lever, I reflected that I had been quite the fool. Working my strength into the effort, I reflected that I was continuing to be quite the fool, but for different reasons.

It took me three tries, and the lever shaking hard with a splintering crack, before the masonry slid away. I leaned into the resulting hollow to pick up a dead woman. There was no reason to believe I knew her, but even if I had, her face was crushed beyond recognition.

Still, I drew her out and laid her in the street with as much respect as I could muster. Doubting terribly, I climbed back into the rubble to look again.

It had been a strange explosion. I was no expert on artillery or the alchemical arts—far from it—but I was fairly certain objects exploded in either one direction or another. From inside to out, as it were. Or the other way around.

This looked as if someone had taken a bowl full of temple and beaten it with a strong spoon. Everything was folded and mixed. Some material had gone inward, some out. Certain objects were pulverized, others nearly whole.

I clambered over the wreckage, searching for more bodies and looking for I knew not what else. If the gods of the Temple Quarter had been roused before, an attack such as this should have them on their feet and erupting from their own rooftops. Or did even gods know fear?

Some of the bricks that appeared grimed enough to have been the old outer wall had chalk marks on them. Sigils. Spells. Random scribblings, perhaps.

As I searched through the piles, the metallic tang in the air faded. The place already had the air of an old rubble pile. Magic, taking the urgency of the moment with it, covering the site over with varnished layers of time. Climbing back down, I looked into the rubble gap from where I'd pulled the dead woman, and realized another woman had lain beneath her.

This one might still be alive.

I cursed myself and leaned back into the gap. When I worked her free, she groaned. Her eyes were rolled back to whites, which did not encourage me, but her ears were not bleeding, and there was no foam bubbling from her mouth.

Perhaps she would survive.

Dragging her out could not be helping whatever was wrong inside her body, but leaving the woman under the bricks seemed even more foolish. I began praying to the Lily Goddess—the closest I knew to Marya, whose protections had so obviously failed here.

I do not know these women, Goddess.

They are not of Your priestesses. They have probably never even heard Your name. They are hardly of blameless virtue, I am certain.

But if their goddess is not able to ease their passing, or bind their souls back to their bodies, I pray You can do this thing for them on her behalf.

If no one claims them, I will wash their bodies and paint the white and the red, in Your name. Better they should rise up and live longer, though.

Not much of a prayer, and smacked more of funeral rites than a healing chant, but it was what I could manage in the moment.

I laid the women out side by side. The first victim was beyond all hope. Even if the very spirit of the goddess took over her body, her face and neck were crushed. She would never breathe or eat, though somehow her brown hair still seemed rich as life. The second one, whose dark hair and freckled coloration suggested they might have been sisters, at least had found her breath.

Water spattered on me. I looked up for rain, but saw only silver light. The air tingled.

I realized the Lily Goddess had not only heard my prayers, She was answering them directly. In that moment, I was too exhausted to drop to my knees or show obeisance, so I sat back on my butt and impatiently awaited the divine.

Now I knew why no one had run to aid me. I was cloaked in the goddess' glamour. I had witnessed this in Kalimpura, that only a few could see Her while most others knew nothing but echoing, chilly silence.

“I am here,” I announced. “You might as well get this over with.”

The Lily Goddess stepped out of a place between the air and the sky and smiled sadly at me. Much as with Blackblood, I saw someone who could have been mistaken for ordinary from a distance, except Her body fairly vibrated with power. My goddess was an explosion contained in the shape of a woman. Her hair was the color of all women, Her eyes shifted from gray to green to black to blue to violet to silver, all with the twisting flash of a windborne leaf in autumn. She was all sizes and shapes and ages, from gawky girl to matronly mother to withered crone.

She was all women.

“You never manifested so in the Temple of the Silver Lily,” I said softly. Always She was a wind, a rush of water, a voice possessing the Temple Mother.

Never before have I appeared to you.

Had I been standing, Her words would have driven me to my knees after all. Her lips moved, but the sounds did not quite match. That sense of power arced out of the goddess like water from a stormy sky. My loins went soft and wet, and I felt the first shudders of orgasm take me.

I knew that the tingle of power from the Eyes of the Hills I now carried was less than one of Her nail parings.

Though I tried to answer Her, my own words were muted.

You are Green.

All I could do was nod. That was like moving boulders with my neck. Pleasure arced through me, so intense it was painful, all the worse because I was not free to throw myself into the sensation.

You follow one of My daughters.

It was slowly penetrating to me that this was not the Lily Goddess. Another nod, more rocks dragged by the sheer force of my neck and head. Fluid rushed from my sweetpocket, as it could when a lover touched me just
so
for a time.

She stepped—if that could be the word—to the two women I had laid out.

My grandchild Solis is dead.

The woman with the crushed face seemed to sigh and settle. She had been lost to life already, but something more had just gone out of her. I clenched my thighs and tried to control myself, against the mad, mad pressure.

A titanic!
The realization was so horrifying I wanted to flee into unconsciousness. If I could have stopped my heart to escape Her, I would have.

My grandchild Laris lives.

The surviving sister—if that was who they were, siblings—seemed to breathe easier, though still trapped in the awkward unconsciousness of the badly wounded.

The goddess turned back to the shattered temple. My breathing shuddered so hard I feared to choke. Then I prayed to choke.

My daughter is passed from the world.

The grief in Her voice was the mourning of the ocean for those mountains ground to sand along its beaches. She cried as the stars do for one of their number tumbled from the night sky to strike the earth. I wanted to die for Her loss, to lay myself down as a cloak over Her suffering, and spare Her even a beat of the anguish that threatened my very sanity.

In that moment, I saw for the first time what it might mean to be a god. Not power, but responsibility. Not awareness, but omniscience. Not emotion, but something so large it would shatter the human soul.

You know Me now.

“Yes, Mother,” I whispered, as though the words were drawn from me as with burning pincers. The fires of my lust were all but forgotten.

Your Lily Goddess is one of My daughters.

Desire.

The girl-child you carry is Mine, through your goddess.

Once again, my passion blinded me to sensibility. All I could think was to rise up in anger, ready to shout:
You will not have my daughter!
The flame of my rebellion, never truly doused, flared even under Her eternal burden of time, power, and sorrow. Nearly crushed beneath the majesty of Her titanic awareness so poorly contained in the swirling woman's body She wore, I still had to laugh. Or tried to. By the Wheel, this was difficult.

“Blackblood told me…” I gasped. The words were birthing hard. “… that I would bear…” Another gasp. This was like lifting stones. “… a boy-child.” My mind leapt right past the obvious answer to those rare unfortunates born both man and woman in one conflicted body. Fool that I was, I did not want to know then what would come in time, what choices these prophecies would bring me.

Then She was gone without ever having been there. The wreckage was full of shouting men and crying women, while boys tugged at the beams and people swirled around me. No one seemed to take note of me, though several bent to attend to the two women I had rescued from beneath the rubble. I felt spent, as if a lover had used me hard through all the watches of the night, and forced me to orgasm far beyond the limits of either reason or passion. I knew I
reeked
of sex.

And fear. Sweat poured from me, even in the cold.

I could see why a woman might want to be a priestess of
that
goddess. I could see more why a woman would run screaming.

Laris, the survivor, opened her eyes and looked at me. She could not gain enough of herself to speak, but I saw that she knew, and that she understood that I knew.

I nodded to her, and touched my cap, mouthing the words
We shall meet again.

Wrapped in the last of Desire's glamour, I walked away unnoticed. My plans for the Eyes of the Hills were forgotten now, set aside in the rush of thought about what sort of power it took to slay a goddess. No wonder Erio had feared.

Anyone who could make such a death magic as to shatter the divine could just as easily have shattered this city were they of a mind to do so. The fault lines that would likely issue from Marya's fall might do it for them.

*   *   *

I found myself deeply disturbed by Desire's intervention. Familiarity with the gods had lent me a dangerously casual attitude, but still, I have never grown easy with such encounters, then or in the time since. All through my life I have learned over and over the lesson that there is an order to the existence of the gods, just as there is an order to the lives of men.
That
I had known since my grandmother's funeral at the beginning of my memories, and I would recall it until the day I was laid out with the white and the red painted upon my own face.

Having Her come to me so was as daunting a violation of the world as having my grandmother return from her burial platform in the sky to correct my words and deeds. Or worse,
her
grandmother.

The
world's
grandmother.

This was not
right
.

During my time at the Factor's house, I had been exposed to any number of books on the divine. They largely contained views of the gods as some historical aspect of the life of the city and its people. In those days the gods were still sleeping away the years under the somnolence of the Duke's magic, so I suppose that had been deemed safe enough.

But even then, the Dancing Mistress had introduced me to the boy-priest Septio, who would later father my child. And Mother Iron, that chthonic force who seemed to me to perhaps be the soul of Copper Downs. Like Desire, a larger being wrapped in a smaller body. A woman sees a goddess much as a fish sees the fingers that drop food into its bowl—with no notion of the vastness looming beyond.

I did not deny the divine. For the love of all that was holy, I held regular conversations with the divine. I had
made
a god.

Desire had been something more. She was to the godhood of the Lily Goddess or Blackblood or Choybalsan or Endurance as they were to my personhood. It occurred to me just then how very odd it was that I had been on a first-name basis with
four
different gods and goddesses, when most of the priestesses in the Temple of the Silver Lily prayed all their lives for the simplest visitation from Her.

Still, the titanics were so far beyond human experience. Their roots were back in the deepest time, before cities and farms and the very tongues of men. To see a titanic manifest …

The sheer thought boggled me. I risked sainthood if anyone knew of this. If these visitations continued, I risked my own sanity.

I needed counsel from deeper in time. Previously I'd rejected the Factor's ghost, when contemplating how to move against Blackblood with the Eyes of the Hills in my possession. But he was the oldest person I could talk to in this city. Erio was tied to his tomb in the High Hills, so far as I knew, and besides was only a whispering voice in the shadows. I had known the Factor in life, at least a little, and held power over him in death, as it had been me who pushed him through the black door in his guise as the Duke.

Further, when I'd last seen the Factor, he'd been standing with Mother Iron. I knew
she
was much older than any of us. Possibly older than Copper Downs itself. Deeper in time, indeed.

A titanic had touched the city. A goddess had died. I still had my worries, but I strongly desired wisdom as to the meaning of
these
signs and portents.

If Surali and her plots had brought about the death of Marya through some illicit alliance with the pardine Revanchists, that signified very ill indeed for the Lily Goddess. And the Bittern Court would little concern itself with my goddess' fall. Quite the opposite, regardless of the consequences. No, I could not send the Selistani embassy home. I needed to stop them
here
.

Thank the goddess I now carried the Eyes of the Hills. Surali and the Revanchists could not seal whatever bargain they'd made without these, I was confident.

My thoughts were circling again. I slipped into an alley and located an entrance to Below.

*   *   *

I strode through an echoing gallery I had visited only a few times. This was not among my usual precincts, from the years when I ran beneath the streets of the city nightly. Coldfire gleamed in abundance on rough-chiseled walls, and I could see wide, irregular pillars holding up the roof atop which this part of the city squatted.