Kalimpura (Green Universe) (41 page)

Besides, a quiet tone commanded far better than a loud one.

Two hundred pairs of eyes glittered down at me.

“I am returned.” Beside me, Mother Srirani stirred, making a signal to the Street Guild guards. It was a calculated gamble that she would not simply have me slain in front of the congregation. “Despite the efforts to silence me.” I pointed at my guards, half a dozen hard-faced men with their hands on their sword hilts. “Would you have these men, our enemies, dictate who might speak among us?”

That raised another buzz, mutters of denial and anger. I passed over the question of whether I had a right to speak at the altar. As a Blade Mother of this temple, whatever rights I did have certainly trumped the force of the Street Guild and their masters in the Bittern Court.

“I will now call upon the Lily Goddess to bless us with Her presence.”

Surely Mother Srirani had seen me make this same play before the altar with Mother Umaavani. She leaned close to threaten in some wise or another, but Mother Vajpai called the same bluff I had and stepped into the circle to grasp Mother Srirani’s arm.

“Not now, Rani,” she said quietly. That carried, too. A smattering of applause was her response from the gallery.

I might be well regarded in some circles of this temple, but Mother Vajpai was held in the utmost respect by virtually everyone. And she
was
the Blade Mother.

Bowing my head, I began to pray. Not a braying invocation to demonstrate my piety or authority, as the Temple Mother had done, but a personal conversation with the Lily Goddess, as I had experienced perhaps too often before.

That the gods would use someone who had before opened herself to them was an incontrovertible proposition to me. I’d fenced around that idea with Iso and Osi, with the Rectifier, with Chowdry. Certainly I had already touched and been touched by more gods than most people encountered in a lifetime of contemplative prayer. Like a tree on a hilltop draws lightning strokes from the heavens, I seemed to attract them. Often with just as much fire and pain.

Goddess,
I prayed.
I know You hear me. You always have, even when I have not meant to call upon You. Your affection for me in this world is ever a mystery, but I welcome Your attentions.

A breeze began to stir. It smelled of rain.

Your house is in great disorder. Your enemies have overtaken the wits of Your servants here. The city that shelters us all comes under greater threat by the day. It is possible the very walls here will be pulled down around us, and we will lose everything that has been built up in Your name over the generations of women who have served You here.

I felt a familiar curdling in the air around me.

If this is Your will, so be it. If Your will is that we should prosper, I beg You to favor us now with Your presence, the light of Your wisdom, Your love and support and guidance. My Sisters’ hunger for Your face that has been turned away from them by our misguided leaders and their wrongful acts.

Come, please. We await You.

I looked up again to see flower petals drifting above me. The congregation was silent, holding in their breath as one woman. The thickened air reminded me of so many of these moments.

Then I caught sight of Mafic. He was grinning. The expression was clearly aimed at me.

This
was what the old bastard had been waiting for, I realized with dawning horror. Not to take me away as I’d first thought, but for me to call the Lily Goddess. Or perhaps both. He must certainly be that clever.

Now that I had invoked my goddess, I did not know how to stop Her coming. I did not even know if that was either possible or desirable for me to do so. I wished mightily that things had gone better with Firesetter, that his prodigious strength might be here at my back. Or even better, that the Rectifier had come across the Storm Sea with me. His power and experience at fighting priests would have served well in this terrible moment.

There was another I could call on. I looked steadily back at Mafic. If Mistress Tirelle had taught me anything during my years in the Pomegranate Court, it was to keep my thoughts and feelings from my face. So with my expression stilled, I began to pray again. Surely not even this one could take on two divine powers at the same time.

Desire,
I said soundlessly, forming the words and releasing them where they might be heard. Like the Lily Goddess, the titanic listened to me. Whatever Her reasons might be.
Your enemies have come to the house of one of Your daughters. Stand forth now that we might stop them here. I offer You the chance to redress the wrongs of the long centuries, and keep another from being struck down as so many have before.

But I had not reckoned on the depths of Mafic’s intrigue, nor of Mother Srirani’s foolishness. Or perhaps it was Surali’s treachery I had failed to understand. I have long since realized there was no difference, that the Temple Mother and the Bittern Court woman had become two ends of the same stick.

That day, all I knew was more Street Guild were shouldering their way into the temple from one of the gallery entrances. My prayer to Desire trailed off at the sight of their weapons above me. Wood and metal stocks without the bow attached. Guns, just as Lalo’s men had used aboard
Prince Enero
. The mystic weapons Chowdry had written to warn me of.

“No!” I screamed at the same time as the Temple Mother spun backwards as if kicked in the chest. The first gun barked, somehow
after
she’d been struck. She dropped to the floor to wind up leaning against the altar. Blood soaked the front of her robes. Her eyes were wide with surprise. Mother Vajpai knelt to Mother Srirani’s side, heedless of the buzzing thunder chipping the marble floor around us.

Turning this way and that, I saw everything as if in one, great glance. There are moments in combat, in lovemaking, in parenting, when time slows to a nothingness and a great well of experience can fill very, very quickly. Blue black smoke drifted from the long guns. Even the men holding them seemed surprised at their effect. In the gallery, women were screaming, leaping to their feet, turning to one another. There were far too few Blades up there. Detained, perhaps, or forbidden from attending this convocation. I saw no weapons on those of my Blade Sisters who were present—had they all been disarmed at Mother Srirani’s order?

It wouldn’t have mattered if they were present, no one could outrun thunder. Not even a Lily Blade.

We would all be dead, or fallen, very soon.

Not knowing what else to do, I leapt atop the altar amid the confused swirl of mist and flower petals.

“You will
not,
” I said, my voice low once more. I drew upon the power of every god who’d ever touched me, upon every tingle of magic or miracle that had passed through my hands thus far in my short life. Filled with a rage as great as any I had ever known in my life, I took the god-blooded short knife in my hand and pointed it at one of the gun-men.

I burned like fire. My hands twisted and popped. The long gun at which I had aimed my will exploded in a burst of fire and noise and shredded fingers.

The great, carved double doors that were the formal entrance to the sanctuary burst open in a rush of foaming water. The ocean had come for me a third time, its boundless fists battering down the swordsmen who had menaced me and sweeping them in a violent boil across the floor of the sanctuary. Mafic stood thigh-deep in the water wrestling with a whirlwind—no,
two
whirlwinds. Desire had manifested as well.

They battled in a small, fierce storm touched to ground. A waterspout, raging, crackling, hissing like some great cat in pain, spitting sparks and fire and flecks of glittering death through the air.

No matter how powerful Mafic was, he was not a god. Let alone a titanic. His trap had been laid for one, not two. The Saffron Tower could never have meant to attack Desire face-to-face under such uncontrolled circumstances. I prayed that Mafic would choke on his success in finding his quarry.

In any event, he seemed overwhelmed just as I had hoped. His gun-men, safely above the flood that lapped at the altar top now, were not. They had turned instead and were firing their weapons into the mass of my Sisters. Those women were trying to flee, being driven out.

Where are the Blades?
Disarmed, and possibly confined, going by what Mother Srirani had said.

I pointed my god-blooded knife at another long gun and willed it to destruction as the first one had. The firearm erupted in a satisfying gout of flame and smoke. Its wielder dropped away handless and screaming.

That gave pause to the other Street Guildsmen up in the gallery. Wishing that I could throw the blade in my hand, but not daring to discard it, I turned toward Mafic.

Fantail
caught my eye. Not dead, not at all. She had ridden the flood like a horse and even now raised long fist-headed snakes of the ocean water to strike at the other Street Guild and their terrible weapons. I jumped off the altar back into the swirling tide and fought my way waist-deep toward Mafic, who mouthed the words of some Saffron Tower ritual as he stood straight against the twinned whirlwinds of his would-be victims. Lightnings crackled around him. He was drawing a whirlwind of his own, the water dark with spume. Around their battle steam rose and smoked, as if Firesetter were here standing against his old master.

He was a human problem. I was a human solution. Soaked to the bone with salt water, burnt by the heat of it so close to this fight, I jumped onto Mafic’s back and jabbed the god-blooded knife into his shoulder, just above the clavicle.

Whether a woman’s touch was painful anathema to him as it had been to Iso and Osi, I did not know. But a blade sunk deep into flesh should be sufficient to interrupt any man’s efforts. He twisted as I grappled around his head, digging the fingers of my free hand for his eyes even as I turned the blade in its wound.

Above me the long guns barked again. Mafic staggered as if he had been punched. His dark whirlwind collapsed, and with it the forms of the Lily Goddess and Desire. I dropped from his back to get a proper swing at him with my short knife, but the tide was already retreating. He rolled away from me with the salt water.

Fearing the firearms more in that moment, I turned my attention upward again. A handful of Blades had converged on the Street Guild in the gallery and were casting them over the rail to fall to the sanctuary floor.
Without
their weapons, I noted.

Mafic, then. He could not be permitted to get away. I whirled back toward him to see him tumbling out through the broken doors. The water was departing, much of it draining through the floor into the refectory and kitchen below, the rest retreating as it had come. A hand plucked at me to stop me from racing after him.

“Not alone, Green,” said Mother Vajpai. She was as sodden with blood and salt water as I. “Not even you.”

Firesetter stood amid the broken doors, glowering. Wisps of smoke danced across his massive red chest, the leather trews, the rough-spun vest.

I stood panting as quiet descended upon our temple once more. A single lily petal spun out of the air to land upon my knife blade and stick there as if it had grown from that place.

*   *   *

The damage to the sanctuary was considerable. Both Desire and the Lily Goddess had vanished. This did not alarm me. More to the point, we had lost many. That was a source of greater concern.

A quick count found the Temple Mother dead, though whether of her wounds or of drowning, I could not say. Six of the Street Guild were dead as well, and nine other Mothers and Sisters of the temple. Most of the slain women had been struck by the long guns. The men seemed to have perished variously of broken necks, drowning, or being beaten. And exploding firearms, I was pleased to note.

An Intercessory Aspirant raced in through the front doors, breathless. “The tide,” she gasped. “It came up out of the sewers … and broke open … the Blood Fountain.” She dropped to her knees. “You saved us … Mother Green.”

Not me,
I thought. Fantail. At most, I’d summoned her. From where had the Red Man’s apsara come, and to where did she go? “She was alive,” I said to him, ignoring the Aspirant.

“And still is,” he growled. “Even now, my Fantail herds the ocean back to its bed, to keep your city dry.”

“Bless you.”

His smile was crooked and pained. “Perhaps you already have.”

The Mothers and Sisters of the Temple of the Silver Lily were gathering close around me now. Hands reached out to brush my leathers or pluck at my sopping, sticky hair. Awed murmurs rose.

“We must go,” I said, trying to shrug them off. “Mafic is loose. The game is blown wide open. Surali holds one of our own hostage, and another beside her. These two need rescue before she grows so desperate as to do worse than hold them in place. And we must smash the Street Guild and the Bittern Court while the power to do so remains in our hands.”

“No,” said one of the older Justiciary Mothers. Her name was Atawani, I thought. “Not yet.”

“You have prayed down the Lily Goddess,” another called out.

“You are the next Temple Mother!” shouted a third.

“No! Absolutely not!” That was insane on the face of things. I would no more be the next Temple Mother than I would be the next Prince of the City. “You will find a Mother in the usual way”—through meetings among the heads of the orders and a vote of the senior Mothers—“but for now, we must release and rearm the Blades. Every Mother and senior Aspirant, so that we might strike while disarray is still upon our enemies.”

Some of them were willing to argue more, especially the Justiciary Mothers, but the rest moved off quickly enough to obey me. I shoved the last of my would-be advisors aside and strode about the sanctuary collecting the surviving long guns. They stank of sulfur and blood. Mother Vajpai walked with me, her former strength of spirit fully restored here in the temple.

“Here,” I said, putting one of the infernal things into her hands. “Please figure what you can of their operation. Whether we wish to use these or not, we need to begin an understanding of how to fight against them.”