Endurance (43 page)

Another of those long, slow goddess-smiles.
You misunderstand so much.

“I misunderstand everything far too often.” My baby moved within my belly, until I rested my hands there and calmed her. Something caught at my eye. I glanced away from the goddess Desire for a moment to see one of the twins' chalk marks high on a ruined wall, glowing with a faint spark.

With a dizzying suddenness, the true plot that was afoot became clear to me.

“You,” I whispered in a slowly dawning horror. My gut threatened to spew. “They are hunting You.” Surali might be playing a game of cities, but the twins were playing a much deeper game of time. And the fall of a titanic now,
this
titanic, would betray women across the plate of the world.

Now you begin to see it.

Someone nearby shouted. The voice caught at me. What would happen next? “I have been the bait in a trap for You,” I told the goddess, almost driven to my knees by my sense of loathing for myself, for the enormity in play. “I have led them to You.”

Green,
the goddess replied gently.
I have been pursued across all the time of this world. They slay My daughters for the same reason one might kill the priests of a god: to weaken Me. Always I raise more daughters, but always they take from Me.

Another shout. Was that a chase, coming closer? “I am ashamed of my bargain now,” I blurted. “Watch for the twins, Iso and Osi. They may be with the Rectifier. But remove Yourself.”

I cannot.
The woman whose body the goddess had inhabited sagged so suddenly that I was forced to leap to catch her before she collapsed upon the ground. Once more merely human, she tried to stand. I could feel the weakness in her, as if all her power had fled with her patroness.

“We must move on swiftly,” I whispered, my lips so close to her ear I might have kissed her.

The woman looked at me, her eyes soft and brown, pain lines etched upon her freckled face. “Leave,” she said in a quiet voice.

“Not without you.” Having rescued Laris once, I could not abandon her this time. Though she was most of a foot taller than me, I swung her arm across my shoulder and walked her away like a Blade aspirant being taken drunkenly to a corner sleeping mat.

Whatever the noise behind us, it did not catch up before we found a new alley in which to hide.

*   *   *

I sat her down on a bale of rotten straw that had been discarded behind some temple stable. The stuff stank, and was sticky with brownish rot, but it was relatively warm, sheltered under the eaves. The furred, thick scent of horses filled the air around us. Their nearby whickering served as counterpoint to our conversation.

“I know who you are,” I said, bending low. “Laris. Priestess of Marya.”

She nodded, eyes bright with tears. Or possibly fear.

How it must break a priest's heart when their god dies. Worse than the agony of a lover perishing of the crab disease, or even a child being taken by the flux. “I am sorry,” I whispered. “Do you know what just happened?”

“She rode me.” Laris' chin dropped, as if she were falling asleep just then and there.

“Desire, not Marya.”

“Desire?” Laris sounded drunk, almost.

“Where
were
you?”

“In the lazaret on Bustle Street.”

I'd heard of that place. Girls went there sometimes to lose babies, either before or after they were born. “A place where women can doctor women.”

A faint smile ghosted across Laris' face. “Men will kill us all.”

Perhaps they already have.
I pushed the thought away. “Do you know what Desire spoke to me of?”

“Wh-when She rode me, I became light.” Laris shivered and pulled herself back deeper into the fouled straw. “I-I'm cold. Can you take me home?”

“No,” I said softly. My fingertips brushed her face, and I felt an upwelling of sympathy and pity for this broken woman. “But I can take you back to Bustle Street.”

“They tried before, you know,” Laris said as I hoisted her to her feet. I considered hiring a horse, but the remainder of my haul from the theft earlier this day wasn't in coin. Not yet. And I didn't feel like trying to bargain a jeweled brooch for brief use of a mount worth a fraction of its value.

“I'm sure they did.” I
had
to return her to where she needed to be. Time was slipping away. At least it was not snowing now.

“Last time we stopped them.” She took a deep, shuddering gasp, then clung on to me. “My sister and me, we stopped them.”

“Stopped who?” I looked out of the alley mouth along the Street of Horizons. Where was Skinless when I needed him, anyway? The Temple of the Frog God rose to my right, faced with slick green tiles and vaguely disturbing sculptures along the roofline. To my left was the Sailor's House, a generic sanctuary dedicated to a dozen gods and goddesses of the sea—from the Hanchu ports, the Smagadine cities, Selistan, and farther beyond the endless horizons of the world's oceans.

The street had traffic, but nowhere near a crowd. I eyed a dung cart that presented some possibilities. A swift getaway didn't seem likely considering the two shaggy mules dispirited between its poles.

Off we went. Laris had found her feet, and stumbled along beside me. She the drunk, I the friend carrying her home to sleep off her misfortune. It was a simple enough guise, all too ordinary for the city. “The Saffron Tower,” Laris breathed in my ear, returning my earlier semblance of affection.

And by the Wheel, my sweetpocket stirred at the warmth of her.
What a terribly foolish moment to be thinking of the solace of skin.
“Tell me about them,” I said, to keep her talking. I knew a little—the Saffron Tower was both a place and a monastic order headquartered in that place. It was located somewhere along the channel connecting the Storm Sea to the Sunward Sea, well east of the Stone Coast. Religious contemplatives on some rocky headland, looking for their gods in the toss of waves and the glare of distant sunsets.

Or pilgrims,
I realized,
searching the world for the pattern of the fall of the titanics.

“Monks,” she slurred. “In yellow robes. Except the last ones weren't monks, they were servants.”

“Servants sent to kill a god.” My mouth was running ahead of my thoughts.

“A Selistani red man and a sprite woman.” She giggled. “He was … something to behold. Something more to fuck. A sturdy giant.”

Selistani?
Red man?
Mythical beings of the Fire Lakes well south and west of Kalimpura. “What did you do with them? Where did they go next?”

“My sister and I took them carnally as a rite of the goddess.” Her voice caught. “I believe they departed south across the Storm Sea after.”

To Selistan. Had the plot been moving before this most recent surge of events? I tried to keep the desperation out of my voice. “How long ago?”

“Years…” Her voice slurred. “Years, and tears ago. Not long after the Duke fell.”

I felt a brief surge of despair. Once again, the whole business seemed to trace back to me.

She stumbled again, and began muttering. I all but carried her through the slush and cold water of the streets. Together we wended toward Bustle Street and the lazaret there. My thoughts dwelled on old men in saffron brocade, whose wiles were generations beyond my own. How much like a god would a man become if he'd lived hundreds of years in health and sound mind? How different were these twins from the Duke?

Magic, divinity, the life of people and cities. It all played together. And I knew what to do about powerful immortals.

Of all people,
I
knew. Some lessons truly did last a lifetime.

*   *   *

A pale, heavy woman with a face scarred by pox and old violence peered at me through a narrow gap in the lazaret's front door. The place had obviously been built for a counting house or something of the sort, and was still fortified as it had been during its heyday. “What is she doing out there?” the doorkeeper asked with a gasp of recognition.

“The goddess brought her to the temple. Laris was not fit to return on her own.”

“Come in, come in…” The door creaked open and I stepped into the shadows to face a pair of crossbows.

Crossbows?

I almost dropped Laris to reach for my blades when I realized the weapons were mounted on swivels, but untended.

“From earlier days,” the heavy woman said. “Though they've been fired a time or two since. Not many here with the strength to string or cock them.”

The winding gears were locked back with pawls, but those weapons should have been manageable even for a fairly small person, assuming the cranks were the right size. Probably no one in this women's house understood that. “You find yourselves under siege often?”

“Sometimes.” A slow sigh escaped her. “A man has every right to his wife,” she added cryptically.

I wasn't sure what to say to that, but something in her tone stirred my unease about stolen children. “Please,” I said. “Take Laris and care for her. Again.”

The woman reached for the priestess in my arms. “You're a killer, aren't you?” She grunted as I shifted Laris' weight over.

“Is that so clear to you?”

“Yes,” she said, over the unconscious priestess' shoulder. “Return if you need shelter. We'll see to you, or give you a safe enough bed. Can't hurt to have a woman like you around.”

If there were a Lily Blade handle to be raised in this city, I now knew of a candidate Blade house. “I will remember you,” I said truthfully. “And I may have a few women to send here.” Mother Vajpai. Samma. Corinthia Anastasia. I made a mental note to inform Mother Argai of this place, its location, and her likely welcome. “Some of those I send may not speak Petraean. They would be dark like me, and have my same manners.”

“Marya help them if so,” she said. “Go, go, woman. And be welcome on your return.”

I slipped back out into the street and puzzled on what I'd just learned.

*   *   *

Wrapped in my stolen robe, I was not so conspicuous as I might otherwise have been. My feet were tired, and I would swear my ankles were swelling inside my boots. In fact, my whole body was exhausted in a way I didn't recall it ever being before.

Pregnancy.

I had never asked for a child. I had also never considered seeking out some place such as the lazaret to rid myself of the baby. She was mine.

Mine.
Not Blackblood's, nor the Lily Goddess'.

Mine.

Thinking about Desire, I could not say if She'd heeded my warning. I'd certainly failed to enlist Her. Most probably, I'd endangered Her anew. Iso and Osi were distracted from Desire for the moment by my co-opting them in an attempt to control Blackblood, but I could hardly hope they'd take him down.

The audacity of the larger plot was almost overwhelming. Plot-within-a-plot. Or more accurately, a plot-outside-a-plot. Much as in the twins' view of the divine, layers played into layers in this matter.

At the core, Surali was making a play for me to satisfy her personal vengeance, and possibly the Bittern Court's, for the way I'd handled the killing of Michael Curry. They'd not won the Eyes of the Hills as they'd hoped. Even so, the gems had been secured with the key I'd thrown into the harbor back in Kalimpura. I pitied whoever had been forced to dive to recover it.

Wrapped around that was a larger effort to overthrow the Lily Goddess and shift the balance of power in Kalimpura toward the Bittern Court and their allies. Specifically including the Street Guild and its longstanding rivalry with the Lily Blades. That effort seemed to encompass an attempt to assassinate the Lily Goddess. Which would, among other things, well and truly put paid to whatever place of safety the women of Kalimpura could hope to find. Let alone those from the rest of Selistan with the courage to come seeking aid.

Laid around all
that
was a larger effort to stalk the daughters of Desire. The Saffron Tower sought to overthrow what it saw as the error made at the beginning of time when Father Sunbones had allowed his daughter Desire to exercise Her free reign in the garden. At least, that was the man's tale. As I'd first read it in
Goddes &e Theyre Desyres,
the story had concluded with a warning to women and their goddesses.

Passing another layer, wrapped around
that
was the effort to stalk Desire Herself. The titanics were long gone from the affairs of the world, or so we who lived in these lesser days were taught. But the old, old anger of men and their gods at the rebellion of women was very real.

Stop Desire from continuing to raise daughter-goddesses at need, and you would stop the thread of subtle power that united and protected women wherever on the plate of the earth the writ of the old titanics ran.

And to do all this, Surali and the Saffron Tower would casually overthrow both the political and divine order of Copper Downs. The sheer effrontery of this offended me. The intersection of a hunt as old as time and a political conspiracy of this generation of power in Kalimpura was deeply unfortunate. My presence at the heart was even more unfortunate.

Or had the Lily Goddess intended this all along? Had Her mother-goddess, Desire, intended this? Was I only and ever a weapon forged, honed and drawn for this moment?

Such thoughts brought me past the verge of illness. I stumbled in the snow, placing my hand on a wall as I toppled past the verge and spewed my guts. Not so much there, in truth—the pears from before, and whatever orts I'd snatched at the beginning of the day.

I was no one's tool. I'd fought and killed to escape being used. The idea that my entire life was of someone's making, even beyond the slavery of the Factor's house, was enough to set my heart racing and my imagination spinning until my head felt fit to burst.