Kalimpura (Green Universe) (24 page)

Mother Argai “We confound her more with silence than with action.”

“Following that strategy, no one would ever raise a weapon in defense.”

“A few more days,” Mother Vajpai said by way of answer. “The Street Guild is already settling down, as Mother Argai tells it. Rumor sweeps on past us to other fascinations. Let people forget the wave, and not connect the beggars’ riot to us.”

“Surali is no fool.” The growl in my voice startled even me. I knew precisely when I had begun to see her as a human being instead of an enemy, and I did not appreciate that shift inside my head. Far better that the Bittern Court woman remain a monster to my way of thinking. “She will infer what we have done. The longer we wait, the more time her agents have to ferret out Little Kareen or someone else who can betray our part in the beggars’ riot and the rest of the business at the waterfront. The more time there is for her to decide to use Samma or Corinthia Anastasia against us somehow. Not just a prisoner or a hostage, but to make a victim of either of them.” I knew my voice was pitched with anger. I did not try to swallow it.

Mother Vajpai drummed her fingers on the table. “So what if she does? We will move against her soon enough, at a time of our choosing. Let her fear our influence.”

I snorted. “Influence among the lowest of the people of the street.”

“We all saw their power,” said Ilona. “You stopped the waterfront, and rescued us from that ship.”

“Will I storm the Bittern Court with an army of the poor?” I laid my hands flat, looked around at them. “Please, let me go look for Corinthia Anastasia, for Samma.”

“I agree.” Ilona nodded.

Mother Argai shook her head. “No. Too soon.”

“For what do we wait?”

“For aid from the Blades,” snapped Mother Vajpai. “Let us do our work, and make our path easier. We’ve already discussed this, Green. It is too soon.”

I turned to Ponce, the tie-breaking vote in our little council. Shameless, I cast him a sorrowful, suffering look. “Please … What do you think?”

He shook his head. “I cannot know. None of this is my way. I … I will not block you, but I will not agree.”

All the more frustrated, I stomped out of the kitchen toward my informal practice room. Over my shoulder, I shouted, “I will obey!”

I did not have to like it.

*   *   *

Mother Argai came over the back wall the next day bleeding and at a dead run. I was in the garden with Ilona and the babies, which was safer now that I had discouraged the golden monkeys from their dung-flinging depredations. I realized a man was following my Blade Sister over the top of the masonry.

“Take them,” I growled to Ilona as I leapt to my feet.

She stifled a shriek, but grabbed the children to race toward the house.

Meanwhile, Mother Argai nodded to me as she raced forward, her chin thrown to one side to point over her shoulder. Though innocent of my leathers in one of the old robes from my room, I of course had my god-blooded knife strapped to my wrist.

The man was armored in light scale—Street Guild, then—and laughed when he saw my little blade. I stepped around his sword and let him impale himself upon my weapon.

Though we Lily Blades did not normally fight to kill, he could not be allowed to leave this place knowing we were here. I rocked back a pace with the shock of the impact and turned the knife to his left, cutting into his heart even as his face betrayed his surprise.

With a sigh, the man died, blood spurting out of the wound to spray me crimson and brown.

I lowered him to the ground and quickly dragged the body into the shade of the ragged trees of our garden. Mother Argai came to squat next to me, breathing hard.

“I could not afford to kill him in the road behind us,” she said. “Too public and too close.”

“Are you hurt?” I asked her.

She glanced down at her own leathers. “Oh. This is not my blood.”

“Where are his fellows?” Street Guild almost never worked alone.

She touched the blood smearing her midsection. “I killed two several blocks away. This one lost his head and pursued alone.”

I looked down at the still face. Not unhandsome, though someone had once broken his nose for him. His big brown eyes that might have wooed maidens—or men—had already dulled. I felt sadness, unusual for me at a death. Almost regret. As if he and I might have been friends meeting some other way. As if he had not come to threaten me and my children.

“This was too close,” I told Mother Argai.

“Yes.” Mother Vajpai had joined us. I saw Ilona peering out from the house, and gave her a wave to signal that I was all right. “Too close.” It was as near as she would come to scolding her old friend.

Mother Argai nodded. “We can hide only so long.”

“Now you sound like Green,” Mother Vajpai said.

For once, I decided to let the argument make itself without my help. Instead, I went to find a shovel. We would need to bury this man here in the garden. Where we sat in a trap, rotting like fruit in a basket.

*   *   *

Later, after we’d cleaned up and everyone’s panic had subsided, we met in the kitchen.

“I cannot say what possessed him.” Mother Argai was sharpening her long knife and not meeting anyone’s eye. Which was very unlike her.

“Our secrecy will not hold much longer,” I said, pointing out the obvious. “He will be missed. They’ll know from the other bodies what area of the city we are in.”

“They likely know that now,” said Mother Vajpai heavily. “But we can’t simply march out of here with weapons drawn.”

“Nor can we wait for forty of that poor bastard’s fellows to come pouring over the back wall and slit my children’s throats,” I snapped. I’d pulled something in my back digging the grave, and still felt oddly guilty about the killing.

“Soon,” she counseled, but I could see her words seemed weak, even to her.

There was little else to say on this. We all knew the arguments already. Perhaps to distract me, Mother Argai gave me another letter. Smeared with blood I trusted was fresh, it was of course from Chowdry. Though my old pirate-priest could not be replying to me yet. My own first letter to him would still be weeks in the travel. I had not yet sent the one I was writing now. I was not sure if I would send it, in any case.

The arrival of a new missive was either pleasing or alarming, depending on the view that I chose to take. I stared awhile at the sealed packet that she had handed me. A coarse, rough paper wrapped the outside, brown and speckled and strange, wrapped with string and sealed with wax blobs in several colors. Plus a spatter of some Street Guildsman’s blood.

Was the artistry an excess of creativity on Chowdry’s part? Or the marks of various couriers along the way?

“How did it arrive here?” I asked Mother Argai. We were in the kitchen, sharing cups of wine. I still had dirt under my fingernails, even after washing carefully. We would have to burn or bury the robe I’d been wearing.

“Friends in the temple passed it to me.”

Of course Chowdry had sent a letter for me to the Temple of the Silver Lily. Where else would he have known to send it? Our casting out was news that would not reach him for a while.

“Thank you,” I said quietly. After yesterday’s argument, I had been reminded all over again how difficult a line Mother Argai walked right now.
She
had not been ejected, but everyone would know she was here on Mother Vajpai’s behalf. One angry Blade, one overheard conversation, and the Temple Mother could with a few words extend our order of banishment to cover Mother Argai.

Or was that lack of pressure a form of cooperation from Mother Srirani? I was coming to understand much better how someone could be trapped in a course of action they neither intended nor approved of.

The letter beckoned me. My racing thoughts did me no favors, and there was small point in postponing reading this. Chowdry was never much for words, not as I had known him. Anything he troubled to tell me from across the sea was probably something I needed to hear.

I broke the seals and unraveled the string. The rough paper fell away from a torn sheet of creamy parchment. The Temple of Endurance had peculiar donations, I knew, but fine writing supplies seemed stranger than usual. I wondered whose hand had written it out for him.

*   *   *

Greetings to Green, once of Copper Downs and departed now to Kalimpura,
it read in Petraean. The rest was in Seliu.

You have not been gone three days and already there is being a new stir in the city. Someone has arrived seeking the twins who so troubled you this past season.

A man has come to the Temple of Endurance asking after you. We have not said much, other than what is already known—that you have left. Everyone who cares to think of it can tell your destination.

His name is “Mafic.” I believe he comes from the Saffron Tower, the source of so much of your recent troubles. A tall man, and smoldering as if he carries a fire within.

I fear for you, Green. If this Mafic sails on toward Kalimpura to challenge you, that will lead to greater troubles even than those twins you fought against. And for your goddess there as well.

There is too much of this violence around you. If you would lay down your weapons, others would stop seeking you. I counsel on behalf of Endurance that you take up a long and peaceful life.

It is to be wishing you well.

Chowdry, of Endurance

The Saffron Tower.
We had heard rumor of the apostate Red Man and his apsara. My need for them was much stronger now.

This had to be bound up in the taking of Corinthia Anastasia and Samma. Certainly Iso and Osi had been part of Surali’s plot before, as she worked against the Lily Goddess through Her now-slain sister goddess Marya. What I could not see was whether this Mafic was another part of Surali’s schemes, or if he was seeking a separate vengeance on the part of the Saffron Tower for the fate of the twins. Surali was acting through the Quiet Men now, it seemed, not through her erstwhile allies.

Perhaps the details did not matter. In either case, the outcome was the same to me.

“What news?” asked Ilona, having seen me lay down the sheets of the letter and stare at our empty counters and tabletops. Mother Argai watched me in shrewd silence.

“Chowdry writes of a new agent of the Saffron Tower pursuing the fate of Iso and Osi.” I sighed heavily as I described the import of his letter. Then: “I had thought their threat settled. Now another seeks them and through them seeks me.”

“We do not yet know the fate of the Red Man,” said Mother Argai.

“He would be a valuable ally.” I passed the papers to her—Ilona could not read Seliu, so there was small point in handing the letter that way. “I would give much to have an hour’s honest conversation with the Red Man and his apsara.”

Ilona reached into the heart of the matter. “What does this have to do with finding my daughter?”

“I cannot say,” I confessed. “But the Saffron Tower was bound up in the original kidnapping through Surali’s plotting. If this Mafic who pursues is cause or consequence, I cannot say. Chowdry did not know to tell me. My heart believes these things are connected.”

“Chowdry writes of events in Copper Downs, weeks’ sail away,” she pointed out.

“Mafic could have come on the same ship as this letter,” I replied. “Time and distance are not necessarily our armor here. If we knew where to find the Red Man, we might understand more of what we face in this Mafic. Through that, we would be better prepared to deal once and for all with Surali.”

“Yesterday you were hot to free my daughter. Today you worry about a man who is almost certainly an ocean away.” Ilona’s voice was bitter. “I see nothing actually being done to rescue Corinthia Anastasia.”

“Nor Samma,” added Mother Argai, passing the papers along to my old friend.

I reached for Ilona’s hand. She clutched my fingers tight, despite her doubts. The touch of her skin was like a balm to me, as always it had been.

“I do not yet know how to rescue them,” I told her. “But I will. Mother Argai and Mother Vajpai tell us we await allies. Now we also await an enemy, hiding from others who grow closer every day. The trick of the thing will be to gauge our stroke most effectively.”

“We’ve been gauging our stroke for months.”

I pointed at the babies sitting in the sun, cooing at each other. “It was time spent for what was needful.”

She began to weep. I was embarrassed for myself, and for her. And frustrated. Others were moving against us, and in doing so closing off our choices one by one.

*   *   *

I awoke late that night, my back still aching a bit and the scent of candles yet on me from my earlier praying over the Street Guildsman’s garden grave. The babies snored gently, each wheezing in their sleep. Checking close, their milk breath was refreshing. My children.

There was nothing about Ilona’s hurt that I did not understand completely. I had already stood firm in defense of my children more than once. She had no weapon but me. She could not raise a hand against her enemies, not a tenth part so well as I could.

A Blade served all women, not just herself.

But sometimes a Blade had to serve herself in order to serve others.

Besides, I was sick of waiting. Sick of obedience. As I’d said to myself time and again, patience was never my way. Surely I could slip over the wall, learn what was needful, and slip home again with no one the wiser. Another night of enforced rest was likely to make me scream with frustration.

I gathered my sleeping children and took them into Ilona’s room. We had spread out in this large house, but she had taken a maid’s quarters. Whether the open spaces bothered her, or she just felt safer enclosed, I had not inquired.

She woke muzzy when I came in. I placed a child in each of her arms, so they snugged against one breast and the other. “Say nothing,” I whispered. “I will be back before the dawn.”

Ilona smiled for the first time in days, then hugged my children close. I was tempted to abandon my plan and slip into the bed with her. That would address a different frustration of mine, to be sure. Instead, I kissed her gently as a promise—unreliable though I knew that promise to be under the current circumstances—and slipped out as the three of them settled deeper into sleep.