Endurance (22 page)

“Utavi would have your head.” Chowdry's old captain aboard
Chittachai
, and as unpleasant a small-time pirate as ever skulked along a waterfront.

“Utavi is not here.”

“He might be,” I said. “I saw Little Baji when I first returned to town almost a week ago.”

That
got Chowdry's attention. “Where!?”

His surprise seemed genuine enough, which served to further lessen my distrust. “The Tavernkeep's place. Where
you
cook. Which is full of Selistani men. It would not be so great a trick to hide one or another there. And the opportunity to learn too much about you, and
me
, is great.”

“Ah.” His face was a study in misery. “This is why I am needing people like Lucia's parents. Their money will be keeping this temple and the god Endurance safe. That safety is my safety.”

I punched Chowdry in the shoulder hard enough to make him flinch. His foolishness would not ruin
my
good mood. “Just think of them all as wallowing coastal ships carrying payroll. You know how to make a raid.”

“This temple will do a poor job of sailing to the next port to escape retribution,” he complained.

“Then learn more, sir priest.” I leaned close. “And listen to Endurance. He's rarely wrong, I am certain of it.” I stood, whistling.

“Green,” said Chowdry. Something sharp lay in his voice.

I leaned forward, hands on my knees, and let him pretend not to think about my breasts. “Yes?”

“Twice now a girl has called in the name of the Prince of the City. One of your Blades, but being younger and softer than you.”

Samma, of course.
Though in fact she was my elder, she was one of those girls who always looked as if she'd been raised on warm milk with a good blanket. Whereas I knew perfectly well that I was a walking battlefield. “Did she present herself with swords at her back?”

Though even Samma alone would be quite dangerous to anyone in this group. She might be among the weakest of the Blades, but a Blade she was.

“No. Just nerves. And always looking over her shoulder.”

“Interesting.” My cocky mood deserted me with the news as I was once more caught up in figuring odds and probabilities. Why would Mother Vajpai send
Samma
to me? Few of the answers that presented themselves seemed sensible. And surely Samma had not sent herself. “What did she say she wanted?”

“To be speaking with you.”

“I'm not going anywhere near the Selistani embassy again. Not without plentiful swords at
my
back.” The memory of Mother Vajpai in the process of taking me down was still fresh. Samma, too. “Did she limp?”

“She walked with a cane.”

Hah.

*   *   *

As Chowdry moved on to his tasks, I returned to consideration of my own troubles. Comfortably seated on the wooden temple's steps in warm daylight, I found that they did not seem so bad. Osi and Iso were not my friends, not in any meaningful sense, but their wise and disinterested counsel had already opened my eyes to certain nuances of the situation. If Samma truly was looking for me, I could turn her against the pardines, and perhaps the other way around.

That mutual leverage appealed to my sense of orderliness, but it also felt like a double betrayal. The pardines, even the Revanchists, were not
my
enemies. Nor would it be fair to think of them as enemies of Copper Downs. If they were fighting anything, the Revanchists struggled against the weight of history and the tangled mass of their own resentments.

If I were not careful, I could make a true enemy out of once-friendly strangers.
And in the Dancing Mistress' case, much more than that to me.

Likewise the Selistani embassy. I was nothing to the Prince of the City. Mother Vajpai could not have turned on me so thoroughly, I simply didn't believe that; she must be playing a deeper, doubled game. Or redoubled, perhaps. Only Surali, the Bittern Court woman, was seriously out to overset me and bring me low.

Now if I could manage to focus
her
and Blackblood on one another, I might truly be free.

All that made me wish I'd explained myself to Iso and Osi better, that they might have given me wiser counsel now.

A motion in the edge of my vision made me glance up. I saw Samma walking toward me. She definitely limped badly. When she realized that I was looking at her, she halted.

“I believe I kicked you in the belly,” I said by way of greeting. This was not a moment likely to incline me to charity.

“Yes. You nearly dislocated my hip.” She grimaced. “I have bruised black as a coal demon's face.”

“Surely you have not been loitering outside the gate?”

“I was not bid to wait here for you. I have been to a kava house three times so far to while away the hours.”

That there was a kava house anywhere near our gate was news to me. I continued to peer up at her, deliberately not inviting her to sit. “You would have betrayed me, alongside Mother Vajpai. Why should I welcome you, even as a negotiator? Especially so?”

Samma looked miserable—sad and nervous, her regrets writ upon her face in the not-so-secret language of her heart. “You have no reason. B-but I have tried to bring you some.”

Resting my hands on my belly, I considered that. Soon I would be too pregnant to fight properly—terribly unbalanced, for one. Then even this weak sister would take me down. Better to listen for a while, perhaps. I resolved to consider new attack strategies even as we spoke. In a way, I was maturing, though then I would have scarcely admitted to a need for such. “Illuminate me, Blade.”

She almost shuddered at my words. “I departed Kalimpura less than a month after you. Aboard a ship called
Atchaguli
. Sister hull to poor
Chittachai
.”

That
was very interesting news, indeed. I bent forward, thinking hard. “To what errand?” I asked softly.

Samma glanced about almost theatrically. She would never do for a spy, or even a decent lookout. “Mother Vajpai put me on your track. The Lily Goddess wanted you to return to Copper Downs.”

Suspicious now, I probed. “The Lily Goddess? Not the Bittern Court?”

“Th-that happened later. After I left.” Her misery deepened. “Please, may I sit with you?”

I relented and patted the step next to me. Samma stumbled over and lowered herself painfully. It was like watching a woman of seventy-six instead of sixteen.

“Did I truly kick you that hard?” I asked softly, my fingers brushing along her thigh.

“You kicked me so hard that Mother Argai probably felt it.”

“I am sorry.” Surprisingly, I found I meant that. “I was rushed.”

“I know. We wronged you.”

We.
“Whose idea was it to take me hostage?”

“L-let me tell it from the beginning. As I understand the tale, at least.”

I could not help myself; I leaned over and hugged my very first lover ever. “Speak, friend,” I whispered in her ear. She even
smelled
like home.

“Weeks I voyaged aboard
Atchaguli
. Until we caught up with
Chittachai
. The crews knew one another—Captain Padma was cousin to Captain Utavi, I think.”

Was
cousin. She gave away a great deal in her assumptions and phrasing. “How was
Chittachai
when you found her?” I asked gently.

“Still floating,” Samma replied absently. “Then. Utavi was an ass, but he took me aboard. Made me prove myself with that poor giant of his.”

“Tullah.”

“Yes.” Our eyes met, and hers shone with something like gratitude. She'd understood my tone. “I fought the man. A large baby, in truth.”

I thought sadly on Tullah, whom I had liked. “Grown enough for Utavi's hungers.”

“Mayhap. It was the captain's hungers that did us in. However else you left him, you also left him angry. I thought he'd sold you. Instead he made to sell me. The crew tried to ambush me after a while, meaning to bind me over to someone searching for you.”

Now we come to the crux of the matter.
“What happened?” I circled her with my arm again.

“I k-killed them all. Except for Little Baji. B-but
Atchaguli
was close by. They would know my deeds, and ch-chase me. So Little Baji and I took the boat deep into the southern sea, to wait among the shipping lanes.”

Keeping myself very still, I asked, “You killed Tullah?”

“N-no. He died defending me. I did kill the others, including Utavi.” She rubbed her hand at some remembered injury. Or blow.

“How did you make it from an empty ship on the open ocean to here?”

“We were picked up in the shipping lanes by
Winter Solace
. Bound for Kalimpura to transport the Selistani embassy. I came back to the docks at her rail only to meet Mothers Vajpai and Argai.” Her misery seemed to deepen. “They never even let me return to shore. I suppose I know too much now.”

“Too much of what?”

“Of
your
story! Of
you
!” Samma's voice pitched up sharply, the anger of a little girl. “It is always you at the heart of everything. It's
you
who the mothers gossip about and linger to say how much they miss. No one cared half so much when Jappa was killed by that drunken carter.”

I did not know Jappa had died. Some impulse to guilt surged briefly inside me, but I pushed it aside. “I am sorry,” I told her.

“Of course you are. Green the magnificent. Green the perfect. There was never a better fighter nor a more goddess-favored aspirant than you!” She took a deep, shuddering breath, trying to calm herself.

“None of that was earned by me.” My voice pitched soft, trying to reach past her anger. Not to soothe, but only so that she could hear what I was saying. “Nor wanted. I was never consulted.”

Samma sniffed. “None of us were ever consulted. We only did as we could. When old Mother Umaavani died, the goddess spoke through her last breaths.
She
wants you back.”

“
She
sent me away,” I said bitterly, wondering who the new Temple Mother was with Mother Umaavani passed on.

“Politics,” muttered Samma. “Even now. Especially now. Whatever you did to the Bittern Court has not faded from their memories. They hate you beyond reason.”

“Hate me enough to suborn Mother Vajpai and chase me across an ocean? Who has been named to Umaavani's office? And who could care so much?”

“Mother Srirani.”

One of the senior Justiciary Mothers. I'd barely ever spoken to her, but she was a traditionalist, I knew. The Blades had not cared for her so much. Someone whose will could be turned against Mother Vajpai, then.

“As for who could care so much … well, Surali could.” Samma took a breath, then blurted as if she were afraid of her own words: “That woman has been bargaining with certain parties—maybe those cat people of yours—for aid in some affair the Bittern Court pursues. I cannot say what it is. They always talk in whispers, using little codes. I don't think even Mother Vajpai knows the story. Just that her hand was forced, and the Temple Mother's, to come here and reclaim you.”

And so now we arrive at why the Revanchists have descended from their quiet hills and announced themselves,
I thought. A ship-borne flow of prior messages had arranged the apparent coincidence of their presence here at this time. “But Surali is not here for me? She is here in pursuit of this other bargain?”

“Oh, she will take you as bonus and be quite pleased with herself, if she can.”

“So why are you here?” I asked.

“They would never let me off
Winter Solace
.”

“No, why are
you
here
now
, with me? Instead of plotting my capture with Mother Vajpai.”

Samma looked pained. “Mother Vajpai came to this city in large part because the Temple Mother thought it far better you be taken by your sisters than by the Bittern Court and their Street Guild toughs.”

“I thought the Lily Goddess wanted me back?”

“She does. But the goddess did not pay for this expedition.”

“So you Blades serve two masters.”
As usual,
I thought with nasty glee. I knew myself to be unfair. Too bad.

“We s-serve two intentions, say rather.”

That line sounded rehearsed to me. I wondered how much of this little errand Mother Vajpai had put Samma up to. There seemed small point in asking. I hugged her gently again, recalling the best of our times together in the Blade aspirants' dormitory. “And you came only to tell me this?”

“Mother Vajpai and I fought,” she said in a rush.

“I doubt that, as you are still walking.”

“N-no! Hard words, not sparring. I-I think this bargaining Surali does is aimed at the Lily Goddess. M-Mother Vajpai does not believe me.”

Samma never was one for holding strong ideas of her own, not when there was someone of character nearby to follow along with. I wondered how she'd hit upon this notion, and held to it in the face of Mother Vajpai's demurral. “Why do you know this?”

“I don't know it,” she said, her voice laced with misery. “I
th-think
it. Some of the ways they talked aboard the ship. How Surali glares at me, as if she could hit me to bruise you. The old rivalry between the Bittern Court and the Temple of the Silver Lily.”

The Lily Blades certainly had their own rivalry with the Street Guild of Kalimpura, which was itself closely allied to the Bittern Court. The Bittern Court controlled the docks, took in moorage fees and levied excise on goods coming and going. Enormous amounts of ready money passed back and forth in those endeavors. The Street Guild were essentially licensed footpads, keeping the general peace against freelancers in return for the freedom to conduct shakedowns and outright muggings of their own.