“Blackblood told me…” I gasped. The words were birthing hard. “… that I would bear…” Another gasp. This was like lifting stones. “… a boy-child.” My mind leapt right past the obvious answer to those rare unfortunates born both man and woman in one conflicted body. Fool that I was, I did not want to know then what would come in time, what choices these prophecies would bring me.
Then She was gone without ever having been there. The wreckage was full of shouting men and crying women, while boys tugged at the beams and people swirled around me. No one seemed to take note of me, though several bent to attend to the two women I had rescued from beneath the rubble. I felt spent, as if a lover had used me hard through all the watches of the night, and forced me to orgasm far beyond the limits of either reason or passion. I knew I reeked of sex.
And fear. Sweat poured from me, even in the cold.
I could see why a woman might want to be a priestess of that goddess. I could see more why a woman would run screaming.
Laris, the survivor, opened her eyes and looked at me. She could not gain enough of herself to speak, but I saw that she knew, and that she understood that I knew.
I nodded to her, and touched my cap, mouthing the words We shall meet again.
Wrapped in the last of Desire’s glamour, I walked away unnoticed. My plans for the Eyes of the Hills were forgotten now, set aside in the rush of thought about what sort of power it took to slay a goddess. No wonder Erio had feared.
Anyone who could make such a death magic as to shatter the divine could just as easily have shattered this city were they of a mind to do so. The fault lines that would likely issue from Marya’s fall might do it for them.
I found myself deeply disturbed by Desire’s intervention. Familiarity with the gods had lent me a dangerously casual attitude, but still, I have never grown easy with such encounters, then or in the time since. All through my life I have learned over and over the lesson that there is an order to the existence of the gods, just as there is an order to the lives of men. That I had known since my grandmother’s funeral at the beginning of my memories, and I would recall it until the day I was laid out with the white and the red painted upon my own face.
Having Her come to me so was as daunting a violation of the world as having my grandmother return from her burial platform in the sky to correct my words and deeds. Or worse, her grandmother.
The world’s grandmother.
This was not right.
During my time at the Factor’s house, I had been exposed to any number of books on the divine. They largely contained views of the gods as some historical aspect of the life of the city and its people. In those days the gods were still sleeping away the years under the somnolence of the Duke’s magic, so I suppose that had been deemed safe enough.
But even then, the Dancing Mistress had introduced me to the boy-priest Septio, who would later father my child. And Mother Iron, that chthonic force who seemed to me to perhaps be the soul of Copper Downs. Like Desire, a larger being wrapped in a smaller body. A woman sees a goddess much as a fish sees the fingers that drop food into its bowl-with no notion of the vastness looming beyond.
I did not deny the divine. For the love of all that was holy, I held regular conversations with the divine. I had made a god.
Desire had been something more. She was to the godhood of the Lily Goddess or Blackblood or Choybalsan or Endurance as they were to my personhood. It occurred to me just then how very odd it was that I had been on a first-name basis with four different gods and goddesses, when most of the priestesses in the Temple of the Silver Lily prayed all their lives for the simplest visitation from Her.
Still, the titanics were so far beyond human experience. Their roots were back in the deepest time, before cities and farms and the very tongues of men. To see a titanic manifest…
The sheer thought boggled me. I risked sainthood if anyone knew of this. If these visitations continued, I risked my own sanity.
I needed counsel from deeper in time. Previously I’d rejected the Factor’s ghost, when contemplating how to move against Blackblood with the Eyes of the Hills in my possession. But he was the oldest person I could talk to in this city. Erio was tied to his tomb in the High Hills, so far as I knew, and besides was only a whispering voice in the shadows. I had known the Factor in life, at least a little, and held power over him in death, as it had been me who pushed him through the black door in his guise as the Duke.
Further, when I’d last seen the Factor, he’d been standing with Mother Iron. I knew she was much older than any of us. Possibly older than Copper Downs itself. Deeper in time, indeed.
A titanic had touched the city. A goddess had died. I still had my worries, but I strongly desired wisdom as to the meaning of these signs and portents.
If Surali and her plots had brought about the death of Marya through some illicit alliance with the pardine Revanchists, that signified very ill indeed for the Lily Goddess. And the Bittern Court would little concern itself with my goddess’ fall. Quite the opposite, regardless of the consequences. No, I could not send the Selistani embassy home. I needed to stop them here.
Thank the goddess I now carried the Eyes of the Hills. Surali and the Revanchists could not seal whatever bargain they’d made without these, I was confident.
My thoughts were circling again. I slipped into an alley and located an entrance to Below.
I strode through an echoing gallery I had visited only a few times. This was not among my usual precincts, from the years when I ran beneath the streets of the city nightly. Coldfire gleamed in abundance on rough-chiseled walls, and I could see wide, irregular pillars holding up the roof atop which this part of the city squatted.
One of the old copper-mine galleries, before those ancients had delved deeper and opened tunnels into the darkest places as they played out their seams. Not that any place beneath the stones wasn’t dark enough to drive any thoughtful woman to the edge of terror.
I listened, as one does Below. Water dripped in a dozen places or more. The air seemed to breathe slightly. No footfalls, no clink of metal, no shallower breathing of meaty lungs. That didn’t rule out ghosts, avatars, or the other supernatural detritus that clung to the underside of this city like currants in a scone.
But then, it was ghosts and avatars I’d been searching for.
Long experience suggested that calling out names was an invitation to unpleasantness. So I headed toward the machines that bulked oily and rusted in the spaces beneath the Temple of Endurance. The Factor or Mother Iron either one could find me far more easily than I could find them.
And right then, to their perceptions, I must have reeked of the scent of divine magic. Even without the touch of Desire, the Eyes of the Hills would draw them like a fire on the ocean at night.
Traveling Below was very much a matter of listening, smelling, and thinking with senses other than the eyes. There was a lesson to be drawn from that process, which was surely part of the reason the Dancing Mistress had taken me Below in the first instance. I walked with lids half shut, hearing how my careful, soft footfalls echoed in the velvety darkness beyond the pallid, witchy glow of the coldfire. The damp, luminescent moss clung mucky to my fingers. I knew that in the complete, natural darkness of Below my eyes would soon enough invent terrors of their own if I did not give them soft shadows to see around the corners of.
When something sparked beyond the pale shell of my coldfire, my heart lurched. I’d been expecting a visitor, wanting one, but still…