Endurance (44 page)

With a chilled hand, I wiped the vile, stinging tang from my lips and moved on. While I'd been thinking, my footsteps had carried me back toward the Temple of Endurance. Why did I need Chowdry now?

But I didn't need Chowdry. I needed the god.

Despite my gloating earlier about slaying the Duke, there was no fire I could raise against Iso and Osi. Not at their age and power. Even the Rectifier might be crushed beneath the weight of their wills. Archimandrix would only be a distraction. At most, I'd warned Desire, though it was inconceivable the goddess had not already known. She was a titanic. She could surely see their every step.

Why She didn't just act against them directly was beyond me. All magic had rules—sorcerous or divine. I didn't suppose it was mysterious for a goddess, even a titanic, to be bound by those rules.

But Endurance … Endurance was not sprung from Desire, nor any titanic. My ox god had not even arisen from the human impulse to religion. I'd instantiated him with the stolen power of ancient pardine Hunts, their braided soulpaths filtered through four centuries of the Duke's iron grasp on the numinal affairs of this city.

Whatever magics and weapons Iso and Osi deployed would be less effective against my Endurance. I hoped.

I swept through the open gates of the temple to ask my father's ox to protect me one last time. And through me, so many others.

*   *   *

The afternoon brought a stinging trace of frozen rain by way of reminding me that winter was here. As if I could have forgotten. Also, more of that raw wind. Chowdry's acolytes had abandoned their construction project under threat from the weather. I heard singing somewhere inside the tent encampment, but I ignored the music. Instead I stepped up to the door of the wooden temple and passed within.

The bead curtain parted at my touch. The ox statue sat where I'd last seen him placed, amid his incense burners and guttering tapers. My belled silk still lay between his forelegs, an offering of my entire life, in a way. Which I supposed was a strange echo of the truth. The hangings on the wall had changed—more added and the rest rearranged. The air smelled of incense and oranges and the slightly rotten odor of rain-soaked wood.

I stood quietly before the ox, so close I could touch his muzzle. The impression of a stable was still overwhelming. And still more than a little amusing. Endurance in life had been a creature of the sun, the water, rice paddies and ditches and the stubbled margins of our little walkway back toward the road to town. Pinarjee, my father, could no more have built an enclosed stable like this than Endurance would have sheltered in it.

Yet I was coming to a renewed appreciation of the relationship of gods to place. Desire had shown me that, as had Iso and Osi in a different fashion. No one in Copper Downs would understand a god who stood in a rice paddy. But a stable was a meaningful symbol to anyone who lived in this land of cold winters and long spring rains.

Carefully I reached out and brushed my fingers across the ox's nose. I almost expected it to be warm and damp, as in life, but that was just an illusion of the moment. Prayers were tied to the horns as I'd seen them before. I hooked a few off, curious what I'd see. It didn't feel like snooping—in one strange sense, I was an avatar of the god Endurance. Or perhaps the god was an avatar of mine.

I laid that uneasy thought aside for consideration at some future date. It didn't need to trouble me now. Instead I read the prayers I'd taken.

I want for Nitsa to rest easy

That
one stirred my heart, for Nitsa had died in my place. I gave the ox a long, thoughtful stare.

I am sorey for what I did to the Merchants' dautter

Please give me a better chance

Green needs peace, her world is too driven

The last one stirred me all over again. I found myself both angry and sad at the same time. I crumpled the prayers, each on a little slip of foil-backed paper, and bent to feed them to a fat, slow beeswax candle burning with the faint scent of oranges almost beneath Endurance's chin. One by one the prayers flared with blue flame. They curled to ashes as they reached toward the ceiling.

When I was done, I rocked back on my heels. Much as when I was a child.

“Do you suppose the god is hearing them better that way?”

Chowdry's voice, speaking Seliu. I heard the clack of the bead curtain immediately thereafter. I considered palming my knife, then realized that if Chowdry wished me ill, he wouldn't inform me of that by stabbing me in his own sanctuary.

“In truth, I am not so sure the god hears prayers at all,” I answered as he came to squat next to me. “Intentions perhaps. Actions certainly. But what are prayers except packaged hopes? And what god will deliver hope when we are here to care for ourselves?”

“Endurance is not hearing the words,” Chowdry said quietly. “But Endurance does hear prayers, I can tell you.”

I favored the priest-pirate with a sidelong glance. “He was my god even before he was yours.”

“It was you who placed me before the god. I will never be forgetting this.”

“Do you pray in Seliu?” I asked him.

“Sometimes,” he admitted. “But even the Selistani acolytes are wanting to worship and pray in Petraean. In half a generation, Endurance will not be a Bhopuri god at all. Just a Stone Coast god with a few odd words in the mouths of his temple priests.”

I looked back at those blank marble eyes. “I should hope that Endurance would ever be too humble to fall prey to hubris.” That was perhaps the point of seating the god in an ox in the first place.

“What are you wanting here, Green?”

I let that question wash over me, wondering the best way to answer.

He mistook my silence and continued: “You are not coming about to debate theology, or develop ritual. You are not being a builder to raise the temple. And for all your dancing with those terrible women back home, I am sure you were never being so much of one for the gods.”

“I want to stop some plots, and set others in motion.” Vague but truthful. “I have met another god—a goddess, actually—who I would never have thought to see even if I'd spent all the years of my life within a temple. Now I have returned to this god. To
my
god.”

“He is not being your god.” Chowdry leaned forward and tapped some ash off the end of an incense stick. “He is belonging to all of us, and to this city. You do not see the roots, but they are there already. Settling deep into stone so that he will never be removed except by great force.”

“I know about roots, Chowdry.” My right fingers trailed on his left arm a moment. “Endurance's roots and my own are in a sun-drenched rice paddy back in Bhopura. Selistan's sun is our sun. Yours as well. And now I will call upon the god for the sake of my memory and his. If he ignores me, well, I can hardly be worse off than I am now. If he heeds my call, then I will have once more raised a great ally.”

“You cannot be summoning gods as if they were clowns for a children's party.”

“No. But I can speak to Endurance as if I were still standing between his legs over a dozen summers past.”

I stood and laid my hand flat on the ox's nose. Closing my eyes, I thought of my grandmother's funeral—that first memory of my life, before the days began to know their number. The bells of her silk sang the last song of her life. Endurance had plodded along, me held beside the ox in my mother's arms.

You were there, then,
I thought.
You bore me up and carried me forward and preserved my history for me until I was ready to write the book myself. Walk with me now.

I caressed the face, from the spot between the eyes down the length of the nose. The horns hung close. I remembered their near-pearlescence in the fiery Selistani sunlight, how on certain days Papa would tip them with woven red balls, one to each side.

I am here,
I told the god.
Come to me.

Chowdry murmured something, but I did not hear his words. The god was warm and close. As I had before, I could feel him. Wordless, of course, mute as any ox, but filled with intention and divine regard.

How have the pardines changed you?
I wondered.
Do you feel their high, hidden groves; the violence of their Hunts?
Pardine power had twisted Federo well past the breaking point, and birthed the strange, short-lived war god Choybalsan. But if an ox was anything, he was a reservoir of calm. A sink for what might have boiled over from a lesser god. A more facile deity.

Sunlight wrapped me like a heated cloak. I smelled the warm mud of the paddies, the sweet bloom of the plantain trees. My eyes were shut, at least here, where the solid mass of the ox loomed close beside me. Flies buzzed, shit stank, and the air was hot and still, while bells tinkled from some place I could not see.

Very far away, Chowdry spoke once more. Again I ignored him.

I need you,
I told the god.

Wordless, the answer came and I still understood it:
You will always have me.

Too many mistakes.

There was no response to that. In time, I opened my eyes. Chowdry sat staring sadly at me. “So it is to pray to the ox god,” he said in Seliu.

I bristled with defensiveness. “Endurance heard me.”

“Of course. He is being very … awake. For a god.”

“You have obviously not met Blackblood,” I muttered. “Or Desire.”

“When I was a boy, the gods of my village were safely quiet. We prayed and made offerings of fruit and money, but they never came looking for us.”

“Welcome to Copper Downs. This place has been a nexus of divine power through the Duke's rule, at least. The new order has not yet settled in. Endurance disturbs that order. Marya's slaying disturbs it further.”

He shrugged. “I know little of gods. Even of this god I serve.” One hand strayed unthinking to the marble muzzle of the idol. “I am not believing in Endurance. Any more than I am believing in the weather. The god just
is
. Like the weather.”

“That must be true of all gods.” I stood, balancing my hands on my hips to stretch my aching back. No more rooftops for me. If further fighting was to be had, I'd best array my champions before me. I could no longer carry my own colors.

With that thought, my next steps fell into line in my mind. Inspiration from Endurance, or just the time spent praying serving as a meditative reflection? It did not matter. I must finish organizing my attacks.

Surali's other men were somewhere in the city. Possibly coming here. My little mob of sailors and refugees could barely be counted upon to watch the embassy, let alone influence its doings. Even with Mother Argai in their midst to lend them both spine and purpose. But if I entreated Archimandrix to set his brass apes onto Surali and the Street Guild instead of Iso and Osi, I could enlist my other allies, who were better suited to the task, to stop the twins. The Rectifier had been watching them for me. I would need him, and through him, some way to secure the temporary loyalty of the Revanchists. Sundering their alliance with the Selistani embassy would be a wise, wise move.

All of this would serve to save Blackblood. Even more so, it would protect the Lily Goddess. And through Her, Desire.

“I shall call upon you,” I told the ox.

There was no answer, as befitted a mute and wordless god.

Outside the weather had reverted to sleet. Needles of icy rain whipped across the temple grounds as if a divine seamstress exerted her chilly wrath. I wrapped my robe close and walked through the construction project to the trapdoor covering my ladder. Chowdry trailed behind me. “You will be having a care,” he said in Petraean.

“I will.” Turning, I drew him into an awkward embrace. We had never been friends of the touching kind. “Surali's men may come here under arms. I beg you to make a defense.”

“No,” he said simply. “Our innocence is our defense.”

“But you are guilty of so much,” I whispered.

His smile was odd and sad.

I turned, opened the trapdoor in the temporary deck, and descended once more into Archimandrix's realm.

*   *   *

This time, Below was much warmer and noisier than my recent experience would have it. Perhaps that was only contrast to the dedicated misery of the weather above. Several of the ancient machines in this mine gallery hummed and clattered. Another thing I had not seen or known of before. Blue sparks wafted around the floor—coldfire, in many hands. Some had been set into gonfalons or lantern-topped poles.

The sorcerer-engineers were preparing for war.

I reached the bottom of my ladder to be confronted by two figures with leather-wrapped faces, eyes goggled and mouths muzzled. It occurred to me that with their guises these priests could be any race of human. Petraean. Selistani. Or something older and more furtive. They were accompanied by a brass ape that shivered and clicked. Though I was certain about the ape, I had to assume the other two were men. No woman I knew would allow herself to smell so.

Neither of them
appeared
to be Archimandrix, but that was hard to tell with the tattered robes and the leather straps and the brass oculae.

“I am Green,” I announced in my most imperious voice.

The men nodded. The ape just clicked some more. When they turned to walk away, the ape followed them. So I followed the ape. Its great legs pistoned like the armatures of an engine. Something hissed within—however they had powered this thing, the magic or natural science of it was beyond me.

A regiment of these armored suits would have its uses in defense, but I could not imagine them being effective attackers at the best of times. Defeating them would not be easy work, but the tactics could not be too challenging.

Could they?

We arrived at a machine that glowed the color of coldfire. The faint blue light crackled along the device's brass and iron limbs. A man was strapped within. His body was gaunt, each rib as countable as a tooth, his penis dangling shriveled from a groin tattooed in concentric triangles that ran across his thighs and abdomen. His chest was tattooed as well, tiny letters in a script I didn't recognize scrawled across his body in a testament to … what?