The market noise rose and fell around us like waves at the shore, but I was completely drawn in to these men and their traveler’s game. “You have gone much farther than I. Home is all but lost to me, even here.” Especially after Kohlmann and Jeschonek had turned me away.
“Home is wherever we lay down our bowls and take our rest.” That was Osi, who laid a loving hand on his brother’s arm.
“Home is wherever I can put aside my knives and sleep in peace,” I told them.
“That is a rare home indeed for one of your formidable talents,” said Iso.
I broke the game then, in a sense, for a rush of frustrated generosity overwhelmed me. “Would that I could offer you a place to stay and set your bowls, but my own position in this city is tenuous. I am sorry.”
“We know this,” Osi said, “for what you say is true of everyone to some degree. Even the wealthy man in his house with a firm count of all his coins considers his position tenuous.”
Iso picked up the thought without a gap in their speech. “You are just more honest with yourself and with us.”
Back to Osi: “We would beg your indulgence, though, Mistress Green.”
Iso: “Priestess or no, you are said to be a consort of gods and a friend to goddesses. You may be able to tell us much to support our pilgrimage.”
“The work of our lives,” Osi added.
As they asked this of me, the spell of the conversation was broken. I did not feel an urge to reject these men. Whatever problems they had were not my own. I possessed too many troubles already.
On the other hand, these two must have great experience with gods and their affairs. And as foreigners, they had no stake in the events unfolding about this city. Everything coming to boil around me concerned pardines, Selistani, or the Stone Coast natives and their petty gods. These men were from a distant place, and had no stakes in the nascent battles.
Could I trust them?
Of course not. Strangers were never to be trusted. But perhaps I could be confident in not counting them as enemies.
“I will make a bargain with you,” I said. “A version of the traveler’s game, in its way.”
“What bargain?” asked Iso.
Did they ever mistake their rhythm and speak over one another, or leave a quiet gap in error? I would guess not, and indeed, never did catch them out so.
“I will tell you what I can of temples and gods here, and the history of this place that I do know well, if from a narrow angle of view. In return, you will tell me what you can of how the gods treat with one another, what deeds they do among themselves. I fear the politics and jealousies that pass among them have already touched my life. I would know more of that with which I am afflicted.”
“Divine favor is ever an affliction,” Osi replied with a small smile. “Though all the priests deny it, who could truly prosper under the fire of such attention?”
In that moment, my sense of affinity with these two blossomed. They understood me in a way that no one here had or would likely be able to. All three of us were strange in a stranger land. I could see how communities such as the Temple of the Silver Lily came into being-people of like mind and allied intent who shared interests. To the grave and beyond, if all went well. Much as what a family was said to be, though I had never known such.
Best of all, these twins were the first people I had met since leaving Ilona’s side who did not place demands on me. All they wanted to do was talk.
“I have seen enough of divine favor to last me a lifetime.” I was surprised at the bitterness that crept into my voice with those words. “A bit more secular favor would not be at all misplaced.”
Iso and Osi exchanged a long glance. It was as if they were conferring, which perhaps they were. What did I know of the bond between twins? Or siblings, even. I had been the only child of my parents. On my one visit back to my father’s farm, I had seen no evidence of Shar, his second wife, bearing him more children.
“We would retire from this market,” Iso told me. “Will you help us find our way back?”
Perhaps this was not a ruse. “Yes.” I needed somewhere to rest that did not involve sleeping with my face pressed against a tavern table. Or bringing on more of Blackblood’s attacks. “I may be a danger to you. There are those who hunt me.”
Another glance exchanged, this one much quicker than before. Then, Osi: “We have learned not to fear. If we are quiet and careful, no one should know.”
I walked with them out of the market. They were a marvel to watch, each moving as smoothly as any senior Blade mother, but always coordinated with the other. A dance in two parts, played out against the rolling tide of a crowd, somehow never touching or brushing against anyone else. They slowed only once, passing a cart from which brass scrap was being sold so that the eyes of one brother-Iso, I thought-could linger on the cart’s cargo before he was shoved onward by one of the scrapman’s boys. Osi took his own look as they moved away.
I slowed my pace as well for a step or three to see what had been of such interest. The cart was large as a beer wagon, the man atop it a veritable draft horse himself. He was selling broken brass statues, bawling out the quality of their work. I let his words wash over my ears, picking them from the hubble and bubble of the crowd.
“… finest crafting! Apes, fresh from losing the races! You knows them sorcerer-engineers don’t use second-rate stuff, not never! Melts down good and smooth, you can hammer it out, all blessed. They died in harness…”
My footsteps had led me out of hearing of his pitch. Brass apes. They had races here, that I’d never seen, clockwork driving the creatures to knuckle through the streets. The last bout had been while I was lurking up in the High Hills. The losers tended to be broken up. I suppose someone had salvaged the clockwork and the cam-based punchleather logic mechanisms that guided their behavior.
I led the twins away from the Dockmarket along Orchid Street, south of the Temple Quarter. The street they sought was a narrow, brick-walled alley almost devoid of doors and windows where it ran through the warehouse district. In fairness not so easy to find if you did not know your way among the stolid buildings. High, blank walls loomed on each side. Iso and Osi stopped in front of one of the few entrances, a watchman’s door, one of them fumbling with the lock. I turned to scan the street while the brothers let us in.
Larceny? Or just a cautious entrance to their own unlikely castle?
When I followed them inside, I beheld an odd place indeed.
The twins had made their temporary home in a warehouse filled with maritime equipment. Anchors rusting in iron rows, their upper cross members close to breaking off. Braces and mounts for masts and their crosstrees. Great coils of rope or chain each thicker than my arm. There was even a suite of offices built into what would have been the fourth storey of the warehouse, facing out toward the street and reached by rickety stairs ascending along the high interior wall.
Everything including the building itself looked worn, used, aged. Which made me wonder who would bother to pay to store such gear.
Iso and Osi had made a nest of boat furniture and tarps near the back of the warehouse. Judging from the tracks in the dust, no one but them had been here in a while.
We sat down and one of them-Iso, I think-lit a small stove powered by alcohol. Without any comment, his brother readied a copper pot to boil water, three plain porcelain cups, and a small bowl of loose tea.
“This is our custom,” Osi told me. “On receiving a friend in one’s home.”
“Home is where your bowl is,” I supplied.
Iso nodded. “And where you may lay down your knives.”
For a while I let them care for me, and marked a quiet time for myself. It was pleasant to belong, even in a fleeting way. Short of some serious scouting, or possibly divine intervention, no one would find me here.