Kalimpura (Green Universe) (45 page)

Authors: Jay Lake

BOOK: Kalimpura (Green Universe)

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It was Ponce. His neck was swathed in a bandage. I pulled myself from my bed and stood to hug him. “You live,” I said in Petraean.

He nodded and pointed at his throat. His breath rasped, but no words came out.

“Mute?” I asked in horrified realization.

Another nod, and tears spilled from his eyes.

“Yet you serve a mute god,” I said quietly. “I cannot help but think there is some design here.”

A final nod, and Ponce clutched me close. I let him hold me a bit too long, then sent them both away.

Chowdry—

I am afraid I have done a great wrong to your acolyte. He still lives where others do not, but his throat was badly hurt and he will never speak again. He communicates by writing and making signs with his hands. He indicates that he does not wish to go home to Copper Downs. Not as he is. I cannot be keeping him in the Temple of the Silver Lily. This is a house of women. I think Ponce plans to build a shrine to Endurance here in Kalimpura.

Ilona died bravely but stupidly. I am coming to believe that most brave deaths are stupid. Better to live courageously than to die courageously. Her blood was not spilled by my own hand, but it might as well have been.

We have put paid to Surali and the Bittern Court, at least. These losses bought something of worth, though their cost was too high.

Mafic is still a problem, but in the care of women and still alive, he is a block of sorts against our enemies. When we send him back, it is in the not-unreasonable hopes of encouraging them to turn their attentions elsewhere. That pains me as well, as I should work to stop the meddling of the Saffron Tower altogether. Sadly, I have neither means nor power to do more than divert them from the goddess I serve and the two cities I call home.

The twins prosper. They will be talking soon. I am afraid of what they will say.

Ilona’s daughter is a more difficult problem. I am fostering her into the Blades where she may make use of that difficulty. Mother Vajpai did well enough with me, another angry little girl from across the sea. Samma also is hurt in both body and spirit, but I expect she will recover in time.

The Mothers of the temple have made an impossible request of me here. By the time you read this, my response will be given, and all of us will have passed along to other concerns. The question is whether I am willing to make those concerns my own. Now I can see far more of your cares there at the Temple of Endurance.

With this letter I send a knife that bears the blood of a god upon its steel. I cast one into the flames, but its twin came back to me. Please have this delivered to Blackblood’s temple. For my part, I believe that it should be a tool of their rites, though that must be between the god and his priests. I tire of a blade than can slice holes in the ocean and split the very wind. It makes me both too dangerous and too lazy.

I would be me, and not this weapon. I would be me, and not this goddess. I would be me, and not these children.

Someday I will be me.

* * *

At sixteen, I was the youngest ever to undergo this ceremony. The sanctuary was clean, the doors repaired, the gallery filled. For the induction, even the kitchen fires were banked, and the very sickest brought down from the healing rooms. Corinthia Anastasia had refused to attend. Samma watched me sadly from a bench above.

I wore my best pale robes, with my belled silk pulled around me. My grandmother would be here in spirit, at least, standing in for the generations who had come before me. Mother Adhiti and Ponce held my squirming children, the generations to come after. Ponce was robed in green now, with a crude pendant in the form of an ox head around his neck. The ropy scars there were painfully visible. I believed he was coming to take pride in them. I knew from some of our private times together that running my finger along the ridges of skin gave him a frisson that bordered between pleasure and agony.

Mother Vajpai and the other senior Mothers of each order stood before me. Water trickled down from above. Flower petals lofted on the wind. The Lily Goddess had opened Her hand over us this day.

Prayers were being said, but all I could think of was the future.

My children could not be safer than here within the Temple of the Silver Lily. As Temple Mother, if I were wise and temperate, I would be able to guarantee that safety until they were old enough for their own risks. From here, I could extend my protection to the other children of Kalimpura and wider Selistan, sheltering them and their mothers. From here, I could deal with the mystery and danger of the Quiet Men, who still waited me for in the shadows of the future.

From here, I could serve the Lily Goddess and in turn set Her to serving those in the greatest need.

There was so very much to be done. That would be true even should I live a hundred years in health, wealth, and power.

I bowed my head and said those words that needed saying, making of myself a servant to all who looked down upon me that day.

Years Passing Like Flower Petals on the Wind

I
STAND WRAPPED
in my belled silk, which has grown quite a bit heavier with the passing seasons of my life, and watch my daughter Marya take her vows as a Blade Mother. This moment gives a strange kind of pride. In a way, these past fifteen years have almost forced her to our life here in the Temple of the Silver Lily. In another way, she has chosen to meet me on my own ground. I could be no more proud than this, until she someday bests me.

My daughter and four other young women kiss their blades and swear obedience upon the altar in the sanctuary. It amuses me that I had never actually taken those vows myself, though anyone who knew has wisely kept that secret to themselves.

Which was almost everyone in the temple.

Still, we prosper well enough under my hand. In ways very different and far richer than poor, deluded Mother Srirani ever envisioned.

Marya’s brother Federo is here, too, largely by coincidence. Some coincidences can be arranged, however. His apprenticeship as a cadet-officer under Captain Lalo aboard the kettle ship
Textile Bourse
is barely a year old. That they should be in port here for the first time since taking my boy-child aboard is good fortune, indeed.

That the ship is owned by the Temple of Endurance and flagged out of Copper Downs is also good fortune, of course.

My daughter’s voice rises, strong. “And to the Temple Mother’s commands I shall hew…”

As if,
I think. She is too much like me.

Desire is here on occasion. She watches us, and sometimes we watch Her. Time, both the titanic and the passage of years, has been a great healer. Oceanus, brother of Time and Desire, will turn His watery gaze upon my son as wind and wave permit, much as He did for me for a time, in the first days of my return to Kalimpura. Or so His secret priestess Fantail tells me. That is sufficient.

As for Corinthia Anastasia, she is long lost to me. Ponce and Mother Vajpai sent her home after a few years. Chowdry writes that she lives, but I know no more than that. She will not allow him to speak of her to me. Some struggles are lost before they begin. Samma has done better for herself, becoming a teacher among the Mothers Domiciliary after it was clear that her wounds would keep her from serving as a Blade. She seemed the happier for it, though we have never again been close since her rescue.

“… in service now and evermore to the Lily Goddess, may Her blessing rain down upon us all.”

Smiling, I speak my part in this. As I always have.

* * *

Much later, in my own rooms, I toy with a pen. It is one of those brass-quilled things from the cities of the Sunward Sea, with a gorgeous cobalt blue ink bottle blown by the craftsmen of Alizar, and the ink itself from a Hanchu stone. I will write, I think, in Petraean here in my chamber in Kalimpura. And so the world goes back and forth, growing ever larger. There are troubles aplenty—there are always troubles aplenty—but nothing so personally terrible as what has gone before.

It is time to tell my children how they came to be who they are today. In order to do that, I know I must begin at my own beginning. Some stories are easier to start than they are to finish.

The bells on my silk ringing lightly as I moved, I put pen to paper, scratching away in a manner of which Mistress Danae, my old teacher who ended her life feral and mind-shattered in the High Hills of the Stone Coast, would have approved.

In the end, so is the beginning. In the beginning, so is the end.

The first thing I can remember in this life is my father driving his white ox, Endurance, to the sky burial platforms. His back was before me as we walked along a dusty road. All things were dusty in the country of my birth, unless they were flooded. A ditch yawned at each side to beckon me toward play. The fields beyond were drained of water and filled with stubble, though I could not now say which of the harvest seasons it was.

Though I would come to change the fate of cities and of gods, then I was merely a small, grubby child in a small, grubby corner of the world.

Tor Books by Jay Lake

Mainspring

Escapement

Pinion

Green

Endurance

Kalimpura

About the Author

Jay Lake lives and works in Portland, Oregon, within sight of an eleven-thousand-foot volcano. He is the author of more than two hundred short stories, four collections, and a chapbook, along with novels from Tor Books, Night Shade Books, and Fairwood Press. In 2004, Jay won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. He has also been a Hugo nominee for his short ficition and a three-time World Fantasy Award nominee for his editing.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

KALIMPURA

Cover art by Daniel Dos Santos

A Tor Book

Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

175 Fifth Avenue

New York, NY 10010

www.tor-forge.com

Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

Lake, Jay.

Kalimpura / Jay Lake. — 1st ed.

p. cm.