Something that frightened me.
The Dancing Mistress studied me carefully for a while. I pushed the paneer and the drink away as she did so-the smell of both worked to further threaten my stomach.
“I don’t suppose you’re carrying the gems,” she finally said. “You could not lie to me about that, and I can see your surprise. You’ve seen them, though. Or know of them.”
“A rumor only,” I blurted. “Back in Kalimpura. Off a Stone Coast ship. I followed the smuggling trade, for the sake of children. I heard things.”
“Blue eyes and green?”
Her shrewdness was closing in on me. I had to give up something more, and do so convincingly enough that my old teacher would believe she’d winkled the secret from me. “A man. Named Michael Curry. They called him Malice. His eyes were mismatched, and he may have guarded the gems.”
“What ship?”
Did I dare deepen the lie? Or was the truth more dangerous? Such things were too easy to check, though, if you had friends in the Harbormaster’s office. “ Crow Wing. Of the Stone Coast. I am not sure which city flagged her.”
So much remained unsaid. I did not mention that I had killed him myself, or that I had thrown his snake-headed key into the harbor, or that I had cut out his eyes to fulfill the letter of the Bittern Court’s death order while entirely abrogating the spirit of it.
She did not need to know these things, my old teacher. Not as feral and strange as she had become. Her struggle against Federo and Choybalsan had marked her as surely as it had marked me. But the Dancing Mistress’ scars were much deeper and stranger. Especially concerning the theogeny of Endurance. Had that calling on her people’s power torn away part of her own spirit?
Now more than ever I wished for the advice of the Rectifier. He was difficult and dangerous, but charmingly unsubtle. Honest to the point of insanity, I suspected.
“I must depart,” I told her. “This food sits ill, and I am needed back at the temple.”
The Dancing Mistress did not ask which temple. I could see a flash of calculation in her eyes as she considered holding me here against my will. Our old bond won out, or perhaps common sense prevailed. Scraping my chair back, I rose with a brief bow to her guardians. “I hope you find what you are searching for,” I said politely. “And I hope even more it brings you what you expect.”
“Thank you, Green.” The Dancing Mistress rose as well, then stepped around the table to embrace me. I tensed, wondering if she would try to take me now much as Mother Vajpai had attempted, but in truth, all she did was hug. While her mouth was close to my ear and the scent of her was stirring the memory of something warm and sweet inside me, she whispered, “I am sorry.”
I smiled and broke away to weave through the tables full of busy men. None of them would look straight at me, but out of the corner of my eye I could follow the wave of stares. At the bar I paid for my food, then leaned close to the pardine working there. “Tell the Tavernkeep that I would speak to the Rectifier should that old rogue decide to call here.”
“Yes, Mistress.” His tone was thoroughly cowed. Was the fact that I associated with the Dancing Mistress so overwhelming for him?
No matter. I strode out the door without hurrying. Once in the alley, I checked again for watchers, then stumbled to the little loading bay I’d used to climb down earlier and spewed everything I’d eaten and drunk in the past hour.
I was sick of being sick. After throwing up, I retreated to the rooftop, not so much to watch the street as to have time to think alone, out of the public eye. The sloping tiles were a bit of unexpected trouble. On the other hand, I now enjoyed privacy, respite, and time.
At moments like this, I very much missed the Blade handles. I’d grown quite accustomed to working in company, to benefitting from experience and wisdom and the annoyance of advice.
Alone, I was responsible for everything.
Alone, I had no check upon my foolishness or my ambitions, either one.
Alone, I was, well, alone.
Still, it helped me to lay things out as if explaining them to a fellow Blade or one of the teaching mothers. That habit has stood me in good stead ever since, just as it served me then. The problem of the raid upon the Temple of Endurance still loomed. Stuck in a line of reasoning that was later to prove foolish, I continued to believe Blackblood responsible, more by process of elimination than through any positive evidence. The attack certainly would have been the style of the old Pater Primus. And the Temple Quarter was stirring. The gods of Copper Downs had awoken in the time since the Duke’s death. That was part of the lifting of the magical hold he’d placed on the entire city. Gods being who they were, I could guarantee they were becoming fractious. Having personally spoken to four gods, slain one, and birthed another, I was sadly an expert on this topic that no sane person would wish to understand too well.
Then there was the assault on the Temple of Marya sometime after my departure for Kalimpura four years ago. I knew very little about Marya as a goddess, except that she seemed to be a local equivalent to the Lily Goddess-watching over women and girls, and possessing mostly a soft kind of power. The Blades notwithstanding, this was as far as that went in Kalimpura. We were a secular force in the service of the goddess, not a divine aspect. Most cities would not tolerate an order of armed and dangerous women, charged with righting wrongs and fighting crime. It would make life too difficult for men.
Marya had no Blades serving her. Only prostitutes and working women and perhaps some of the wives of this city. So when-who? Someone had come for her, bearing whatever power it took to strike down a goddess; if rumor was to be believed, the goddess had resisted.
Even if Marya had fallen, after a time another would have risen in her place. That was the way of things among the gods. Trouble might come between, however, especially for those dependent on the goddess or her successor for protection. Those were never easy transitions.
I’d read enough theogeny during the days of my forced education to understand something of how the divine settled upon the world. Much like lightning stalking beneath the storm, divinity was power that sought grounding. I had no idea if the stories of Father Sunbones and Mother Mooneyes and their garden before time held any literal truth, but the figurative truth was undeniable. Male and female principles filled the world with the same energy they drew forth-from sex, from death, from flowering trees and falling leaves and the spume of rivers. And most of all from the hopes and fears and thoughts and prayers of the men and women of every race and kind and species in the endlessly long plate of the world.
What we people provided for the divine was a channel. A concept. A mold. Blackblood manifested as he did because his followers expected it of him. Pain was real enough, and those who suffered sought a focus for their need. Likewise my own Lily Goddess. She manifested as the regiment of women who worshipped Her could best see Her. One of us. Just vaster, wiser, deeper. As the ocean is to the dreams of a raindrop.
But as to the question of who could even attempt to throw down a goddess, I didn’t care to contemplate it overmuch. I knew all too well what was involved in such a task, and I had been supremely fortunate in my endeavors. Whoever the god killers had been, they were gone. I was here now, my divine patron mute as I had made him. On my own, for most purposes.
As for those purposes, mine were not so clear to me at this moment. The Selistani embassy complicated things further. Especially since it had drawn the Dancing Mistress and her Revanchist associates down from the Blue Mountains in search of the Eyes of the Hills.
I believed my old teacher’s claim that Matte had foreseen the gems returning to Copper Downs. The gems must have traveled here through the agency of Surali and the embassy. No other explanation made sense.