Kalimpura (Green Universe) (38 page)

“Mother Vajpai is not lost,” I said. “Merely misplaced.” Looking around, I gathered them all in by eye. “I will go to the Temple of the Silver Lily if it is your will. To seek her, and to try to raise the Blades myself.”

“Better I should be going, Green,” said Mother Argai quietly.

“No.” I was afraid she might have her own agenda, secret orders or some agreement with Mother Vajpai to which I was not privy. But I could hardly say that aloud. “I will go. You know how the Blades see me. If I appear now, it will be as a call to action.”

“Some of them hate you,” she offered. “And many of the Mothers of the other orders are not so fond of you.”

“And some of them love me. You yourself told how they have begged for my return.”

“No one is neutral toward you, Green,” said Ponce unexpectedly. “I know nothing of the Blades, but I do know you. And you are, well … inspirational.”

Mother Argai nodded reluctant agreement to that last. “People are following Green even when they are knowing better.”

“Especially you,” I said with a smile.

“Especially me.”

“Then I will go,” I announced. “Before dawn. You must care for the children, and help Mother Argai make ready to move swiftly when the need arises.” I glanced at the doors leading outside. “It might be well to try to speak with Firesetter again. He was willing to talk with me this afternoon.”

Mother Argai looked interested in this development. “I will sit with him awhile.”

I still could not sort out whether her interest in the Red Man was lust, or worship, or possibly both. But she was not mine to command. Even if Mother Argai had been so, I could not determine what would be best to do in this case.

She slipped out the door, a jug of water in her hand. After she went, I turned to Ilona and Ponce. “As for you two…”

“As for us two what?” Ilona asked. Her voice was soft again. “You are not here to tend our hearts or our bodies. You go over the walls in darkness, and return wrapped in moody silence, and sometimes barely remember your children. We are here, and will continue to do what is needful, but do not recount us our wrongs.”

Ponce winced at this speech, but did not look away or contradict her.

“I had not planned to call you wrong on anything,” I lied. “Just to ask you what you might be able to do with the children while I was gone.”

“Same as we ever do,” Ponce said with a strange look on his face, somewhere between frustration and anger.

At that, I gave up. Instead, I took my daughter from him—in this we could still cooperate peaceably—and went to lie down awhile in the sleepless dark with both my babies. Their gurgling breath in time with each other reminded me all too sharply how every one of us was someone’s child. Even Surali.

How could I kill, knowing what effort had gone into making each life that stood before me?

Rage,
replied a voice deeper inside me.
Anger will always power your arm when a blade is needed.

I am ashamed to say that even to this day that is still true, though wisdom and age have done much to temper me. Even words can strike a man down, when spoken to the right person, and this I have had to learn as well, to my further shame.

*   *   *

An hour before dawn, I was in the kitchen ready to leave. I had slept poorly, and my wounds itched abominably. Fear of Mother Vajpai’s fate had crept into my mind during the night like the tide rising. For her sake, I left my children behind once more in the care of others. The goat milk we had been procuring would continue to serve to keep them fed until my return.

My leathers were cleaned, mended, and finally fitted me to their proper snugness, My blades were honed—even the god-blooded short knife required attention from time to time. I had pulled a shapeless gray robe over me. No pretense of being Sindu this morning. Those women did not work as servants in the quarters of the city much beyond their own. I planned to approach the Temple of the Silver Lily as I had last left it, in the guise of a kitchen drab. A large, crude basket under my arm gave me the excuse I needed. Ponce had picked fruit from the yard under the cover of darkness to fill it and so grant me plausibility.

“I do not know how long I will be gone,” I told them. “But I hope to be back in a few hours.” Glancing at Mother Argai, I added, “What of Firesetter?” If I failed, he might be her only ally in entering the Bittern Court by force.

“He steams the pond with his tears for his consort,” she said with an odd formality.

I kissed Ilona, then Ponce, and hugged Mother Argai close. “Tend to him,” I whispered, in hopes it would heal them both.

Going out the back way, I paused beside the Red Man. Though he had settled some, he still held the same position in which had been kneeling for over a day now. Any human would have long since collapsed from joint pain. “You have been a friend to me already,” I told him.

He turned his head to look at me. In the predawn darkness, his eyes smoldered like glowing coals. “You have paid too much to fail.”

With that benediction in my ears, I slipped out the postern gate in the rear. We’d given up pretense of secrecy, as there seemed small purpose in it now. All I needed do was walk away quietly.

*   *   *

At the hour of dawn, the cats go to the tops of their walls and the curbs that bound their small, vicious domains to welcome in the new day. I have sometimes thought of them as being present to carry away the shadows of night on their fog-soft feet, but they are most likely keeping an eye on one another. Those who hunt are ever suspicious and resentful not of their prey, but of their rivals.

Walking past these small, poised sentries, I wondered on my friend the tiger. Had he gone back to his garden? Or was he slain by one set of panicked guards or another? It was hard to imagine him stalking the streets of Kalimpura, but perhaps he had found a nest among the banyans of Prince Kittathang Park and sat even now to watch the dawn like the thousand thousand of his small similars that dotted the city.

Today it was just me, the cats, and the bakers’ boys out with their morning flatbreads. The odor of burning still hung low over the city, but it more resembled an old rot now, not the open wound of yesterday. Whatever fighting there had been seemed not to have spilled through the darkness. I had seen enough of that in Copper Downs, with torchlight hunts and drunken gangs of guards or soldiers rampaging through the city,

Was it that here in Kalimpura even enemies agreed to sleep? Or were we simply too tired to carry the fight through all the watches of the night?

The fatalistic mood carried me all the way to the Beast Market and the square around the Blood Fountain. Already the cages squeaked and groaned as they were brought from their warehouses and quiet courtyards. Two dozen sorts of animals muttered and groaned and squawked, each complaining in the manner of its kind.

The fountain flowed, too. The red stone that lent its color to the name still looked black in this dim light. The temple was quiet. I noted the steps still seemed far more clear than normal. The usual assortment of beggars, petty merchants, and the simply homeless were largely absent. At least this morning their places had not been taken by masses of the Street Guild as on my last visit.

Those bastards, too, were doubtless sleeping their way toward another day of thuggery. At that time in my life, I had already understood no one is a villain in their own story, but I did wonder what tales the men who did the fighting, and the bullying, and the swaggering, told themselves of the rightness of their cause. Did the poorest deserve to have their fingers stepped upon so they would give up their last copper half paisa to buy a fighting man’s evening ale?

At least my acts had purpose.

Or so went the tale I told myself.

Without purpose, I was no better than they.

I drifted away from the plaza, down Juggaratta Street to where I could corner to my left and find the alley that led to the various back entrances and exits of the Temple of the Silver Lily. As with any great house or public building, the façade of power at the front was supported by a warren of the small and functional at the back. We even had our own smith, though she and her apprentices forged blades rather than horseshoes and wheel straps.

Several cart teams idled in the alley, their drivers each waiting his turn to unload. Fish for the day’s stew, bags of rice that the head steward must already be regretting the rising price of, and a load of small, promising barrels all lingered for induction into the maw of the kitchen.

I walked swiftly past the quiet argument at the loading dock and up the steps that led into the kitchen’s vestibule and mudroom. Beyond the crowded space of cloaks and boots—some of the undercooks and scullions had walked through ash and muck to reach their work this morning—was a familiar space of clanging pans, roiling steam, and smoky odors.

Home,
the thought came unbidden. Home, where they were having poached eggs and spinach for breakfast, from the smell. And rice stew, of course. Always rice stew, for those who did not have time or privileges to sit in the refectory.

I slipped in with my basket and headed for the cool room to deposit the fruit. It was a prop, but that was no reason to waste what I had brought. Fondly I imagined taking a turn at the stew pot. Some of the papayas I’d brought could be cut into it to render a meal more suited for daybreak, but that was not my purpose here. I’d practically been living in a kitchen for the past weeks, but except for our tiny oil stove, we’d made no decent use of it at all.

No one met my eye, which seemed odd. I’d never been in a large kitchen where a stranger was not instantly visible. These people worked arm in arm every day from dawn till dusk, and overnight as well for some of them. I glanced around and realized that no one was looking at me at all.

If one had looked down from the gallery, one would have seen me passing through the kitchen in a little pool of invisibility and silence.

They were ignoring me with an elaboration that spoke volumes.

I slipped into the cold room, which was empty at that moment, and set the papayas on a higher shelf. They’d keep well enough not to need the space closest to the precious troughs of straw-covered ice below the shelves.

My basket I left there as well, and my gray cloak. Here inside the temple, I would be a Blade, by the Wheel. Woe to anyone who challenged me on that. I checked my weapons, then stepped back out into the kitchen. Silence followed me past the chopping tables and the baking ovens, right until I reached the podium where Mother Tonjaree surveyed her domain.

She stood there now, one of Sister Shatta’s fresh sweet rolls in her hand, and smiled down at me. I slowed my stride and smiled back. The sweet roll descended and I took it from her without stopping. We exchanged a final nod; then I passed out of the kitchen like cook-smoke, up the back stairs that would take me to halls running behind and between the dormitories. There I might find a quiet, friendly ear and learn more.

*   *   *

I knew from what Mother Argai had told us that there was much sympathy for me and Mother Vajpai among the Blades. In our banishment, their honor and pride had also been reduced. Mother Srirani had trod too heavily on everyone’s oaths of obedience.

Besides which, we were sworn to the Temple of the Silver Lily and to the Lily Goddess Herself. Not to the Temple Mother. She was, after all, merely the chief among servants.

This in turn meant that if I managed to avoid the Justiciary Mothers as I moved about the temple, I was far less likely to be called out or turned in. I would not fight my own Sisters here, but neither would I allow myself simply to be quashed.

Nor would I skulk. Here, architecture was my friend. The sweeping, curved lines of the temple, which some wags both in and out of our Sisterhood had likened to a woman’s sweetpocket, meant that there were very few interior walls that ran straight and true. Rather, everything curved or angled. This in turn meant short sight lines, multiple turnings, and a number of odd little spaces that were often used for art, storage, or other miscellaneous purposes. When I had been an Aspirant, we’d played hide-and-find among these halls with chalk-tipped sticks to mark our “kills.”

Today I would be no one’s kill.

Instead, I slipped up a curving staircase into the second-storey back corridor. The central space of the sanctuary was behind the wall to my right. A layer of rooms wrapped around it on the outside of the building. The sanctuary narrowed more rapidly than the exterior lines of the building, which meant the layers of rooms grew wider and more complex level by level.

The second storey was mostly offices and portions of our temple library. I highly approved of quiet little rooms stocked with books. For one thing, I might find a senior Blade Aspirant on her sixth or seventh petal in here studying against the chance of some quiz from a teaching Mother.

Assuming, of course, that Mother Srirani had not halted the Blades’ training progress along with her banning of their runs.

Insanity,
I thought. Who would hold the Death Right if we did not? Only an arrant fool would give that power to the Street Guild.

A servant trotted down the corridor in the other direction behind an armload of linen. I stepped aside to let her pass—not an ordinary courtesy in caste- and class-conscious Kalimpura, but something we practiced among women here within our walls. There were no male servants, or men resident of any kind. Only a few visitors on sufferance for needed errands or important business.

“Thank you,” she muttered, then glimpsed my face and stumbled to a halt.

I am distinctive. Deeply so. In Copper Downs, it was as much for the color of my skin as for anything else. Here in Kalimpura, the scars slashing my cheeks were like a banner advertising my identity. Not to mention the healed wounds in my nose, courtesy of the late, unlamented Councilor Lampet. There might be a thousand young women in this city with my build, but there was only one with my face.

“Hello,” I said quietly, reaching for this one’s name and utterly failing. Touching a finger to my lips, I added, “This is a quiet visit.”