Kalimpura (Green Universe) (34 page)

“Hello,” I said. “Street Guild, come for a drink after a hard day of duty?”

*   *   *

They backed me into the wall by the door. Mother Argai hovered behind them, frustrated in her attack by my helplessness. The barkeep swept up her cashbox and disappeared through a door at the back of the room. Most of the few customers followed her.

Firesetter and Fantail did not do so, I noted.

“Back away, woman,” growled one of the Guildsmen to Mother Argai. “This is not being your fight.”

“Any Blade is every Blade,” I said pleasantly.

“But we knows you ain’t no Blade,” one of my other attackers said. “You been read out.”

I could attack them at any moment, and they knew it, too. But with three knives pressed into me, whatever effort I made would impale me on their points. By the same token, they could not compel me to much, because once they moved me out of this position, I would be very difficult to contain.

“You have only two choices here, lads.” I let my face bloom into a smile that was hopefully worrisome to them. “Let me go, or kill me where I stand.”

“Killing you wouldn’t be the worst thing,” muttered their apparent leader. He’d obviously come to the same realization I had. There were not
enough
of them. It took three to contain me like this. If they sent one for allies, Mother Argai and I would best the other two. Or we could just all stand here until someone’s bladder drove them to desperation.

“No, not the worst thing,” I agreed, and marked him for special punishment. “But not the best, either. Instead, why don’t you take a message back to your masters, for that bitch Surali?”

His face scrunched with thought. Neither of his fellows looked any swifter of intellect. “Walk away?”

“Walk away with my message,” I said patiently. “Carry word back that you have met the fearsome monster Green, and she has a bargain to offer the Bittern Court.”

“What is it?”

“Give me back the hostages, and I will grant Surali what she wants most.” Even I did not know what that would be, other than my head on a spear, but I wanted to get out of this situation intact. Besides which, it would be worth the trouble if she did respond. Talking rather than fighting was always a good sign. A lesson I’d come to late, but was learning to appreciate.

“You don’t—” He was interrupted by the door banging open again.

All three of them glanced to their left. Two of the knifepoints wavered, weapons following the eye as I had been drilled so thoroughly by Mother Vajpai and my other training Mothers.

Mother Argai was already in motion. Me no less. I tried to slide around the last knife rather than onto it, but the point caught my leathers and scored the side of my chest. Even as that wound bloomed pain like fire, my knee caught the silent one of the three in the groin. Mother Argai’s knives took the thinker in the kidneys from behind. The third turned with a look of triumph already dying on his face and dragged his knife back across my fresh wound.

I gave him a faceful of my own knife, then slumped against the wall. Mother Argai had already turned toward the four new men who’d come in. They drew their weapons with a speed that spoke of training.

More Street Guildsmen, fellows of these three we’d just dealt with.

Pushing off from the wall, I followed Mother Argai to meet their steel with mine.

Two on four was not improbable odds, but the Street Guild had trained to fight the Blades. Some among them had studied us with care. They knew at least certain of the tricks of our fighting style.

That meant I found my first three or four thrusts blocked. Mother Argai had scored a touch, but her man was not down yet. We were fighting in an open doorway. People in the street would hear. More would come soon. And we had no maneuvering room or reserves of our own.

What I needed most was not to beat these men down, but to get away before more arrived to block my escape. Otherwise I risked capture. At this point, that might be worse than death.

“The back door!” I shouted in Petraean, slashing at one of these four. They were bunched up together as well, or they would have been more dangerous to us.

“At the count of three,” she called back.

Then an enormous red fist whistled past me and simply
shattered
the skull of the man I was fighting closest. He collapsed with his face in a pulp.

A knife tip scored my forearm through my leathers as I turned to the next Street Guildsman. Firesetter reached in and grabbed that fellow’s weapon hand with the blade still in it. His much larger fingers closed over with crushing strength, judging by the man’s screaming. The Red Man yanked and my opponent stumbled forward to fall full length on the floor.

The other two retreated hastily up the stairs. Already I could hear shouting outside. “Let’s go,” I snapped, still in Petraean.

Mother Argai led us out the rear door, deeper into these cellars but farther away from the street entrance and the panicked violence surely building outside. Firesetter and Fantail followed.

*   *   *

A few minutes later we sheltered in the loft of another stable. I would rather have taken my rest in the Poppet Dancers’ ox-house, amid the memory of Endurance and perhaps some of the god’s favor, but our swiftest path had not led that way. Or perhaps Firesetter meant to protect his own. Six or seven shivering mules huddled below in the farthest corner from us. They were too frightened even to bray, and besides Fantail had silenced them with a touch and whisper as we’d arrived in this shelter.

Firesetter was shivering, too. I worried for the straw in which we all crouched. Shouts in the street continued. I was very glad that Kalimpura did not have a city watch. The Street Guild would come in more force, and soon, but this was not the part of the city where their sway was strongest. They would have trouble sweeping freely from house to house and building to building as they might have done down along the waterfront.

Not for the first time, I wished this city had a decent Below. We could have made our escape good long since.

“Why were those fools coming here to drink?” I wondered aloud, though my voice was still a whisper.

“Surely avoiding their serjeant,” said Mother Argai.

Well, that made sense. To a point. As we had gone there because the place was cheap and anonymous. Those qualities were attractive to many people besides us.

Still, I wondered if more was afoot. “I wish I knew if that Mafic had arrived in port yet,” I muttered.

“Mafic?” asked Fantail over Firesetter’s rising rumble.

I smelled smoke for real now. That was serious business around stables and straw. “Make him stop!” I hissed. “Or we’ll be burned out of here.”

She touched the Red Man. “Mafic,” he said. It was like listening to a building speak.

Now was definitely not the time for this, but I had to understand more. “You know him?”

The words came from very far away. “He was my fa— trainer.”

“He is here, or will be soon,” I said. “Pursuing me in the matter of the death of the Saffron Tower’s twins.” And possibly them as well, though they did not need to hear that from me. These two understood who and what they were far better than anything I might say to them.

“You … fight … Mafic.…” The burning smell was distinct. One of the mules finally brayed even through whatever glamour Firesetter had placed upon them.

“Yes. And I’m about to fight a fire if you don’t stop this!”

As if called by me, open flames began to dance around him, lighting the straw dust in his hair and rendering Firesetter’s face into that of a true coal demon. “Mafic!” he roared.

The mules screamed and bolted. Fire erupted all about the Red Man. I cursed and jumped down out of the loft. Landing hard on the wooden floor below, I realized a moment later that no one had jumped after me.

That was alarming.

I looked back up. Sparks already flew in the air, straw crackling as it burned. Fires were vile things to be inside a building with, and I knew full well what could happen to blaze in a stable or a granary.

“Get down here!” I shouted.

Mother Argai peered over the edge of the loft. “We cannot move him.”

The obvious did not occur to me. We all nearly died because I did not stop to think. All I could encompass right then was to wonder whether Firesetter had no sense of self-preservation.

Scrambling back up the ladder, I found myself in choking smoke. Outside, someone was already ringing a bell and shouting frantically. There would be buckets of water and tense, angry men here very soon. If we were thought to have set the fire, it wouldn’t matter what the Street Guild wanted with me. The local residents would beat us to death.

Firesetter lay on the loft floor, curled in a protective ball. A gigantic protective ball, but the position was so similar to one my babies sometimes adopted that my heart surged. Mother Argai crouched beside him. Her eyes flickered with desperation. Fantail had her hands on his arms, and seemed to be pouring water onto him from nowhere at all. Out of the air?
How?

Much more to the focus of my attention, flames raced through the straw and licked at the posts supporting the stable’s ceiling.

“We go now,” I growled.

He rolled over and blinked at me. Those eyes seemed as bright a red as if the flames had originated from within. “No.” Firesetter’s voice was a collapsing wall.

Fantail looked up at me, and oddly, she seemed more exasperated than desperate. I was surprised. “You need to leave,” she said.

The hissing and cracking of the flame were becoming louder. Outside, someone shouted again. How had they known so soon?

The mules, I recalled. Someone must have seen them bolt and spotted the glow within.

I grabbed Mother Argai’s arm and wrenched her toward the edge. She did not want to come with me, still held by that strange fascination she’d evidenced with the Red Man.

“It won’t matter for us if we wait another minute longer!” I shouted in her ear. “Nothing will. These two can take care of themselves.”

She didn’t believe that, and neither did I, but we
did
share a sense of self-preservation, and so we jumped. This time the floorboards cracked beneath us, raising a cloud of dust. The sparks drifting down had set piled hay and straw to smoldering.

My instinct was to descend to whatever level lay beneath the floor—storage, I presumed—but I feared being trapped there. So I sprinted out of the shadows and into the courtyard beyond.

At least the stable had not faced the outside. Instead of a whole street’s-worth of people, there were only a dozen men gathered, already organizing into a bucket brigade. And none of them were Street Guild.

“You bastards!” shouted one of the men. He charged me, swinging his bucket for a bludgeon. I ducked the heavy wood and caught at his arm to pull him around. I did not need to fight these men.

“The fire!” I screamed back at him. “We’re here to help you, by the Wheel.”

He paused, confused even in his rage. I grabbed the bucket out of his hand and raced for the well pump that was already being furiously operated by one of his fellows. Mother Argai followed, pushed the man aside with a nod, and continued working the handle.

Whatever rough justice was intended for us was postponed in the face of fighting the fire. The stable was not inside the buildings of this court, unlike the Poppet Dancers’ stable, but was rather a separate structure backing against the rear wall of the enclosing buildings. The roof already smoldered, well out of our reach.

Racing back toward the fire with my own bucket, I realized the men weren’t trying to dampen the flames already burning. Rather, they were throwing water on the face of the surrounding structure, where the stable met the building wall.

That made sense. I had an idea, and grabbed at the leader. “Do you have a team of oxen?”

“Here?”

“Anywhere! We can pull the stable down into the court, away from the buildings.”

He nodded, realization dawning on his face.

There had been all sorts of tack and equipment inside. I’d raced past it without looking. Mule harnesses were not normally an interest of mine. But if rope or chains hung there …

I handed my bucket off to a new volunteer and headed back into the stable. Smoke was settling from above, oozing out the top of the doorway.

Inside, I saw no sign of Firesetter or Fantail, but the glow from the loft was much worse. The little fires down below had caught and were trying to combine. The air was acrid, thick, foul. I found it hard to see or even think.

Still, my purposes were simple.

And both chains and rope were present.

I wrapped chains around the two wooden pillars that rose beneath the leading edge of the loft. They were the central support of this part of the roof. Taking a rope thicker than my thumb, I bound the chains together. Another, longer rope, I tied off in a T to the cross-line, then paid out toward the door.

“The building will fall down,” I called, or tried to, but the effort of speaking loudly in the thickening smoke made me cough so hard, I started to cry.

I stumbled out with the rope in hand to drop it, then began retching. It was as if I’d been poisoned. I was miserable, too. We were going to lose both Firesetter and Fantail to something so pointless as this. They would be dead. My best path to our missing hostages would be closed off.

It made me want to scream with frustration, but my throat was too raw.

Mother Argai knelt beside me. “Are you going to be well?”

Unable to speak, I nodded furiously.

“This would be a good time to pray up the tide, if you can.”

That made me laugh, which was painful. This far from the waterfront? I could only imagine what the ocean would do to the city if I somehow called its finger down upon myself once more so distant from Street of Ships.

Finally I managed to stand. Someone was hup-hupping at a team of four very reluctant oxen.
They
weren’t going near the fire. My rope had been joined by a longer chain, which meant another brave soul had run at least briefly into the stable. Two boys were flipping the paired rope and chain over and over, spinning a simple braid for strength, while another man signaled the ox-driver to get his team into position.