Endurance (15 page)

When I picked up Amitra's “beauty,” it smoldered into flame. The flare lit the gathering shadows of evening as someone gasped. I put the little fire to the black candle first, then spoke quickly before it burned my fingers. “Doubtless she was vain,” I said, bespeaking her sins and sorrows. “As all the beautiful are.” I reached for the white candle and spoke to her hopes and dreams. “She believed in something beyond this life, or she would not have been here.”

When I moved around the bodies to reach for Nitsa's “peace,” that slip of paper also flared of its own accord. I lit the black candle. “She might have resented others their grace.” I could not know this, of course, but I had known solid girls in the Temple of the Silver Lily, and it was a fair guess. I had no need or desire to understand this dead woman's more shameful sins. Then the white candle. “She made music that others might know joy, which is one of the greatest gifts.”

I shook the last of the paper away from my fingertips in a shower of sparks and ash, then walked back toward the smoke reek of the tent camp. The circle of watchers melted before me. Someone called out in a soft voice, “What shall we do with the bodies?”

“Bury them,” I said. “Or send them Below to sleep with the echoes of history.” My work was done.

I found my cot and slipped into a deep, dreamless silence. Even the worry of another attack was too far from my mind. The last thing I heard was a buzz of voices without, as the people of Endurance's temple took up their watch over me.

*   *   *

Sunlight glowing through the canvas brought me awake hard and fast. My fingers were blistered, the tips sore and ground in with clay. I took a long moment to recall why that might be.

What
had
I done? Armed men on the loose looking for me, and I'd spent half a day playing at being a psychopomp. The memory of timeless peace was close by, though. I realized that I must have been under the protection of the gods.

And goddesses.

This morning, I was protected by nothing more than my wits and my knife, as had been the case for so much of my life. I rolled out of the cot and looked to my workboots. I didn't recall taking them off last night, but someone must have. These boy's clothes stank more than my old leathers by now, but they were not uncomfortable. I was better off without the sleek drama of an assassin's guise in any case.

Food.

I needed food. At that thought, my gut roiled. The baby made me hungry. I had not eaten at all yesterday afternoon. I was fairly certain this was poor practice for a woman with child.

Patting myself down, I slipped my long knife within my corduroy trousers and into the scabbard alongside my thigh. My short knives I tucked inside my sleeves. The arrangement was not ideal, but carrying a sheathed weapon openly would defeat the purpose of this guise.

I slipped outside the tent to find breakfast.

Half a dozen of Endurance's young acolytes stood waiting for me, along with several older men and women. Their faces were a mix of pale and dark. Neither Chowdry nor Ponce was present.

“What do you want?” My tone was more brusque than I'd intended.

“Nothing,” one of the young women said.

“Well, I need breakfast. Then I must go out into the city, and make sure the tragedy of yesterday is not repeated.”

“W-will you visit the wounded before you depart?”

A sharp retort was on my lips, but I swallowed the words unspoken. “Yes, but not to dress them for death.”

They trailed me to the tables next to the ruined kitchen tent. The canvas cover was gone, but in the morning's unusually decent warmth I did not care. Ponce was once more frying sausages, this time over an open fire, camp style. Some of their cookery gear had been salvaged. He smiled to see me, though without his grinning enthusiasm of before. With some effort, I smiled back.

That seemed safe enough.

When he offered me the pan, my smile grew more genuine. The world was hard, lives had been snuffed out, but as Mistress Tirelle had beaten into me, good cooking makes up for a multitude of sins. Using the same simple ingredients as before, I made up light, tangy eggs with the sausage cut into them.

Also as before, once I'd cooked a sufficiency, I ate as if food had just been invented for the first time. The watching circle was different, though. Not amazed at a young woman eating like a cartload of soldiers. More like people waiting for a miracle.

Between mouthfuls of egg, I made to shoo them off. “Don't you have work to do? I am not entertainment.”

Ponce touched my shoulder. “They hunger for your words.”

“Silly fools,” I spat in Seliu, before I recalled that almost half the people here were Selistani, and surely could understand me.

Those took no offense, but smiled shyly.

I am rarely pleased to be told what to do, and never dance when called upon, so I finished my meal in a grim silence. This did nothing to discourage my watchers. I resolved to depart the temple grounds as swiftly as possible. Let them try to follow me through the city. I could swarm the roofs or go Below and lose every one of these soft, wealthy children within a block or two.

With that thought I glanced at my older watchers, wondering if they were truly seeking wisdom from me, or keeping an eye on their younger charges.

No matter. I had to take some action. I had sulked and skulked too long, and it was never my way to let the fight be brought to me. “I shall visit the wounded,” I announced as I scraped my fourth plate clean. “Then I will head out into the city.” Someone else could clean this makeshift kitchen.

Now that I knew that Surali and the rest of the embassy were in the Velviere District, I counted it reasonably safe to head back to the Tavernkeep's place. There I might find some answers from my friends among the pardines, for whom the human politics of all this would be little more than an amusement. If that.

I rose, looked around, and realized I had no idea where the wounded had been taken.

“The temple,” said Ponce helpfully. He made to lead me there, though I knew perfectly well where it was. We trailed acolytes and elders as a duck trails her hatchlings.

Chowdry was within, alongside a Stone Coast woman in a formal dress of the last decade's style among the wealthy. She was covered in blue silk falls with a shallow bustle; not the richest mode anymore, but the clothing signaled her status as a respectable, decent matron—Mistress Leonie would have approved of my quick analysis. The woman was also a doctor, judging from the black case opened wide with the metal instruments of her trade spread across a square of white silk.

I was struck by how pretty she was. A nose too broad for the tastes of the elite here in Copper Downs, but snubbed and sweet upon her lightly freckled face. Gray eyes flashed, and brown hair streaked gray seemed to match.

In another time, at another moment, I might have approached her with a smile. Instead I looked to the men and women lying on pallets on the floor.

Five of them. Three were sleeping, and seemed to have their color, so I did not fear for a sudden death. One was awake and staring at me with bright enough eyes that her fate did not concern me so much either. The fifth had been receiving the attentions of Chowdry and the doctor. He looked sickly pale, especially for a Selistani.

“I am here.” First I went and knelt by the bright-eyed watcher. Taking her hand in mine, I smiled, and thanked her quietly. The three sleepers I stroked slowly across the brow one after another. Each sighed in their turn. Finally I sat beside the severely wounded boy.

“What of him?” I looked at the doctor.

“A hard blow to the belly with the butt of a staff.” Her voice caught at me, stirred something within. “He has ruptured inside. Bodily humors that should never mix are being drawn together.”

I reached my hand toward his gut. Chowdry gasped. Looking up again, I snapped, “I am no miracle worker. I just sorrow for his pain.”

In the end, that was all I could say to them. The wounded were wounded in my name. I had a fight to carry forth to my enemies.

*   *   *

Out on the streets, I walked like a boy. Which is to say, not the supple, confident lope of a Lily Blade—a stride we had cultivated carefully both for its efficiency in a night-long run through Kalimpura and for the air of power even a small woman could project—but, rather, the cocky strut of a young man balanced between pride and embarrassment, angry at the prospect of being discovered for an impostor in his manhood.

More Selistani were on the streets here than I remembered there being even a few months ago. Far more than had been resident in Copper Downs when I'd first escaped the Factor's house. With my short hair and my cap low, so long as I kept my face down, even with my darker skin I was just another working lad. I had not yet found a way to hide my scars, and continued to be torn as to whether I should even try to do such a thing.

Still, I swaggered a bit, not enough to attract challenge. A fine line in its own right, and a distracting little piece of playacting while I muddled over the meaning of yesterday's attack on the Temple of Endurance. More to the point, I muddled over my sudden devotion to funerary rites.

I had laid out bodies before. We did it for our own in the Temple of the Silver Lily, Blades for Blades, justiciars for justiciars, and so forth. Sometimes the Blades did the duty for people we had slain, for one reason or another of Kalimpuri precedent, law, or custom. And we had discussed it often enough during my education.

Mother Meiko had always averred that anyone who was prepared to kill should equally be prepared to manage the entire process of dying, death and beyond. As we Blades were technically priestesses in the service of the Lily Goddess, this was sensible enough. Nuns, of a sort, though that was a Stone Coast concept with no real Seliu equivalent. Fighting nuns who ministered to their targets.

My thoughts continued while I dodged grocer's carts and shoals of dark-suited clerks. While I had not killed Amitra and Nitsa, they had died for me. So it was right that I would lay them out. But what of my intense and unexpected obsession with the ceremony?

I could only conclude that the god Endurance was showing his people what he expected of them. My first memory of Endurance was of my grandmother's funeral, so fair enough that these rites should be adapted from what I could recall of her own, overlain with later knowledge.

There was something haunting about the idea of future generations of Copper Downs being laid to rest with a ceremony that had its roots in Bhopuri death customs. “For you, Grandmother,” I whispered. A tiny and much-belated funerary offering. Still, I could not help but think that she would understand and approve.

My feet had led me to the breweries near the docks. Even my wandering mind could not ignore the odor of yeasts and hops and spillage, and the spoiled barrels placed out on the loading docks, from which the poor could drink unmeasured at their own risk for half of a split copper tael or some shred of barter. Horses, too; the district always had that smell of horse, those monstrous great beasts that drew the brewery wagons about the city.

Beer I was fine with, horses I mistrusted deeply. The broken screw that had borne me on my fateful trip with Septio, leading to his death and my pregnancy, had been a wicked animal with a special hatred for me in its liquid eyes.

An ox, now, there was an animal with which you always knew your place. No question of standing with an ox. They never got above themselves, and generally were not independent thinkers. Little wonder that Endurance had manifested as he did. I shuddered to think of the moods of a horse god.

I strode casually past the mouth of the Tavernkeep's alley. I was pleased to note that no crowd of Selistani filled the narrow roadway as they had on my previous visit. Wandering around the block, I chanced to duck unnoticed behind a hops wagon, then scaled to the roof of the warehouse that should back onto the tavern. From above I scrambled across the tarred sheet metal expanse of the warehouse's flat roof, then dropped to the sloped tile of the tavern itself.

That building was three storeys tall, though I'd never been above the second floor. It surely also had a cellar for beer barrels and the distilling of bournewater, the mountain liquor of the pardines that looked like rain and stole away the sense of any human who imbibed more than a few sips. All I could do from above was watch the entrance and the alleyway. There I could see who might be watching for me.

Blackblood's men, for one. And people from the embassy. Not that the Prince of the City cared, but I had come to understand that Mother Vajpai and Surali were at odds, just as they had always been back in Kalimpura. Both of them had business with me. So possibly two sets of watchers from the embassy, poised for me and for each other. And by now, Kohlmann and the Interim Council might well have their own people tracking me.

Erio didn't need to have been concerned for Copper Downs. All the old ghost needed do was be concerned about me and the troublemakers I attracted.

Too many cared where I was to be found. Too few cared for the right reasons. I would not give up my baby, and I would not give up myself. So with my long knife balanced across my thighs I crouched up on the roof, the cistern behind me to break my outline against the sky. There I hunted my hunters as patiently as if they were rabbits in the meadows of High Hills.

*   *   *

A surprising number of Selistani came and went over the next hour. At least a dozen of them passed down in the alley, almost all men. They seemed of the meanest and poorest classes—beached sailors, displaced farmers, idled laborers. Most were burned dark by the sun, without the pale, oiled sleekness of the aristocracy and the merchant castes. Almost without exception they wore faded and patched kurtas, very nearly the uniform of the country of my birth for those who could not afford more, but whose modesty forbade a dhoti or a mere clout.