Endurance (28 page)

Finally Osi spoke. “Our rites are our own. You know that we share little with women.”

Iso sounded embarrassed as he added, “Never in our pilgrimage have we before experienced the least temptation to open our wisdom to any female.”

“Never before
now
,” his brother added. “You are different.”

“We will show you some of the ways of shielding yourself from the eyes of a god.”
Or goddess,
I thought, as Iso went on: “And we will think on how to turn aside this Blackblood's thrust of divine will.”

No one would claim my child. Not Blackblood, not Desire. No one but me. Even my claim as mother was only proxy on my daughter's eventual claim upon herself.

*   *   *

I spent several productive days with Iso and Osi. Even now, after all that later took place, I recognize that they stand among the greatest teachers I ever knew. Before sundown I would leave them and find quiet corners in which to sleep about the wintering city. The warehouse district offered possibilities for protected rest among untended burlap sacks or just above the musty warmth of stables. I was just as glad I'd placed my silk in Endurance's care for a little while. It was bulky, delicate, and not always so silent as I required.

I did not need to seek out food, as the twins were kind enough to provide for me, though we never shared directly. In regard to my being absent from the affairs of Copper Downs, it suited me that Mother Vajpai and Samma and Surali might think me plotting against them with hidden forces. Sadly, I had no such forces, but the fears of my enemies were ever my allies. As for Chowdry, he could manage Little Baji on his own. Whatever the pardine Revanchists were about did not concern me until they chose to make it my affair. Which they would, soon enough, if Samma's theft of the Eyes of the Hills and subsequent loss of them to me were to become known.

This education was different, more focused than what had taken up earlier years of my life. Instead of spending my days fighting, or learning the finer points of some household art, I labored at understanding the mechanisms and foibles of the gods. While this warehouse was neither the Pomegranate Court nor the Temple of the Silver Lily, I was back in the schoolgirl's seat again by my own choice.

I enjoyed the process immensely.

Iso and Osi taught just as they spoke—with shared voice and overlapping movement. Again and again I was struck by their almost eerie closeness, and wondered how they would have fought, if their rite had called upon them to be so trained. I resolved that if I should ever have the raising of children beyond my own—a possibility, given my eventual ambitions in Kalimpura—that I would school them much as I had been, across a broad range of skills and interests, save without the bondage and petty cruelties. And I would pay very special attention indeed to any twins who came into my care.

Gods tended to settle into their temples and places of power. That was obvious enough. The mechanisms were not so clear. Newborn, drunk with the energy of their creation, as both Choybalsan and Endurance had been, they could walk the world. Older gods like barnacles became not so much senescent as sedentary. Their miracles grew quieter. Here I thought of the Lily Goddess and how She spoke to the Temple Mother back in Kalimpura. Much like the difference between a maple seed spinning on the wind and a tree rooted and grown large.

“But,” I asked, “a god cannot grow
into
a titanic, right? They were possessed of the power of their place and time at the morning of the world. This gradient of rank you speak of does not flow smoothly in both directions.”

Iso smiled at me, the broad, quick grin of a teacher's pleasure in their student. “The world changes. A flower cannot grow on hard rock, or salty sand. In these later ages, the plate of the earth no longer offers fallow soil rich enough for titanics to take root.”

“So only those titanics such as Time”—
and Desire
—“who survived from before the sundering of the gods are still about.”

“No one raises temples to them,” Osi said quite seriously.

“They are woven into the fabric of this crowded world.” I wondered what those words of mine said about the titanics. Was stifling your siblings from returning to their power blessed foresight or the worst sort of betrayal?

Iso frowned. “Fair enough. For now.”

We continued to pursue related matters. How worshippers affected a god. Why altars might be broken, and even a little of how; then far more of why not and how not to do such things. What the true role of priests was—not intermediaries for divine favor, as I'd always understood, but serving to shield people who might follow the god from the raw force of divine regard. Which explained some of Chowdry's behaviors. He had been changing. Even the diffident, reluctant pirate Chowdry I'd met aboard
Chittachai
would have thought it the height of idiocy to leave a gate unguarded, or at least unbarred. The new Chowdry infected by Endurance's almost overwhelming mute nonviolence had done exactly that.

“Gods are like an ague or a grippe,” I argued. “A plague of faith spreads about a place. It rages early and strong. Soon the people most subject to be taken by it have been infected, while the rest make their accommodations. In time faith subsides, mostly affecting travelers and newborns and those with a sudden change of circumstance. Priests carry faith the strongest. They spread the complaint, while also shielding the worst of its effects.” I wondered how this explanation squared with, for example, the betrayal of Blackblood by Pater Primus and his hierarchy.

Osi shook his head. “I would not have thought to explain it so, Mistress Green, but it seems that you have a grip upon the question.”

“So the gods need us to carry them through the world, as fleas need the rats who carry them from ship to ship and port to port. What do we need them for?”

“You of all people should be able to answer that,” Iso replied sharply.

In the course of our instruction, I'd told them more of my own history and the various events that had brought me to this point. Judiciously edited, of course, to protect the guilty. I also continued to avoid any reference to my encounter with Desire. I'd come to appreciate that while these two did not have personal interests in the disputes of Copper Downs, they certainly had purposes that might not be fully aligned with mine.

Choosing my words carefully, I ventured a reply. “We need them for protection from ourselves, I suppose.”

“Go on,” Osi said.

Somehow, in my readings this question about our need for gods had always been assumed to be a basic condition of humanity. “Blackblood is a pain god. He relieves suffering, in a sense. That is his rite and sacrament. I know there are temples in this city devoted to the rites of death, and others to healing. There are gods for sailors and shepherds and to watch over women. But such a view renders our gods into little more than guildmasters, parceling out skills and favors for those who petition correctly at need.”

“Some gods are small,” Iso replied. “To meet small needs.”

“Faith,” said Osi, “any faith, charts a course through life. Sets a purpose. If one's life has enough room in it to look beyond another meal and a safe place to sleep, one begins to ask questions. Questions faith, and a god, can help answer.”

I thought of Shar's unquiet desperation on my father's poor sliver of land back in Bhopura. Her life had no room to look beyond her next starveling meal. By contrast, the Temple of the Silver Lily was packed full of fractious, well-fed women who asked questions all the time. And demanded answers. Was it fair to say that we there had faith and Shar did not? “Not so much faith,” I answered, finishing my thought aloud, “as a framework for living.”

Iso pounced. “Consider that the Urges gave a framework for the titanics, and the titanics gave a framework for the splintered gods, and the gods give a framework for their avatars.”

“And people give a framework for the entire spectrum of the divine,” I pointed out. “This is a circle, not a slope. If they help us with our purposes, surely we help them with theirs? How else will a sailor's goddess know that the sea is her domain if sailors and their widows do not bring her their prayers?” Surely drowning men saw
someone
.

“Yet some purposes are higher and deeper.” Osi again. “And stand outside the small needs.”

“Our rite is such a one,” Iso added. “We pursue a map of the dispersion. In doing so, we seek to redress an ancient wrong so that the world might be better balanced.”

But they would speak no more of that. Foolishly, I let the matter drop.

*   *   *

In the course of three days we ranged across theory, practice, and purpose. Along with the rest of my abbreviated lessons—such a syllabus, to cram into so few words and scant hours—they showed me how the view of a god into the world is colored by his worshippers and his purposes, and thus how one might hide oneself away from a god's eye with crafty misdirections. A certain symbol scratched upon a wall might draw aside the mystic power present in a place. The one who placed it there could pass through unobserved. A prayer or rite, if known, could be turned in on itself and to a degree the effects would be reversed. A gathering-in of both the spirit and the body, following certain signs, could make one as silent and small as a shadow on the wall. Walking in curves provided no angles to reflect the attention of the divine.

Strange and useful lore, much of it with applications in the more mundane world of Blades and runs and street violence. Further proof to my thinking that the gods were not so different from us. Just …
more
.

We also talked directly about how to thwart Blackblood in his purposes, given the manner in which I understood them at the time. Or at least we did so as directly as Iso and Osi ever spoke of anything. “Even gods may be trapped, stopped.”

Killed,
I thought, recalling Marya, and Desire's grief amid Her ruined temple. Who would cry so for Blackblood should he depart the world? The fall of Choybalsan had not riven the city both because he was so new, and because his power had been preserved in the form of Endurance. In a sense, this was true of Marya as well: The grief of the titanic Desire served to focus Her attention, likely providing the energy that kept the death of Marya from echoing far more widely. Who would hold Blackblood's place in matters divine?

I knew from my readings in my younger years that the cost of god killing was high, not necessarily to the killers, but to those who lived on after. Nothing Iso and Osi had said now led me to believe otherwise.

At that price, would I be willing to strike Blackblood down if he did not give me and my daughter his leave to pursue our lives as we would? This is what my newfound teachers hinted at.

“I have much to do in this city,” I said. “And soon. My enemies abide, plotting and awaiting the plots they expect of me.” Or simply the attack. I laugh to think of it now, but I was late to subtlety. “You aid me in understanding Blackblood's needs and purposes. I suspect he will not be turned aside by suasion, no matter how cogent the argument. Better that he be stopped and directed away from me permanently.”

It occurred to me that I did not wish them to strike Blackblood down like some bandit on the road. God killing was not the answer. As I'd said, I merely needed to twist the god's attention from me. Likewise the entire trail of divine affray that seemed to follow me through my days.

I craved the ordinary.

“What would you sacrifice to reduce a god?” Osi asked.

“I have nothing worth so much,” I replied, “except my own life and the life of my child. Those I will not lay down. Not even for this.”

“Think on it,” Iso said.

The Eyes of the Hills burned hot in the inner pocket of my shirt, and for a moment I imagined that the canvas smoldered. “I will, but I do not see much changing.”

“We shall think, as well,” Osi replied.

The evening of the third day, I bid them farewell. “I take a pause from our lessons and discussions tomorrow. I need to spend time seeing how far out of control my other fires have burnt.”

They promised to meditate further on the matter of Blackblood. I promised to return with such additional insights as my explorations brought to me. I believed I'd intrigued the twins, given them a pretty problem against which to exercise their theories.

*   *   *

That night I kept to the streets. The weather had grown sufficiently wet that I'd stolen a rather nice dark blue oilcloth coat from a banker's coach. The broad collar I turned up against the cold, steady rain that had taken over from the squalls of earlier in the week. Gas lamps hissed and burned along some of the wider thoroughfares. The rest were lit haphazardly by house lights, carried torches, or were simply embedded in wet shadow. In the dreams Archimandrix had spoken of to me, the bottled lightnings of the kettle ships would snap and spark from each corner, until Copper Downs might have seemed some great trading metropolis of the Sunward Sea.

Listening to the city, I wandered up to Lyme Street to see if I could secure another cardamom roll. The little teahouse with its bakery was already closed for the day. That meant I would have to find something else to feed the baby. The last few days of living on lentils and flatbread had maintained me well enough without satisfaction. I wanted more. I would have given much for a well-stocked kitchen just then, that I could prepare myself a feast.

Likewise my balance had gone off a bit further just in a few days. Growth of the baby, growth of the woman carrying that child within her. “You will
not
pull me down,” I whispered in a low voice, patting my daughter before I trotted on into the night.

I would have loved to find the Rectifier now, but I was still not ready to simply barge into the Tavernkeep's place again. Especially not with the Eyes of the Hills close against my breast. Still, absent a cardamom roll, I'd seek out such food as I could, then set myself to finding the old rogue on the sly. He'd not be too hard to locate. Surely he was looking for me by now, given the gossip to be had. And if anyone could triangulate the twins' advice for me, it was the Rectifier.