Eventually I eased down onto the floor next to the Rectifier and covered myself with the bedroll he seemed to be ignoring. If there were bedbugs about, they would have to work very hard for my attention this night.
“I need your help,” I finally said.
“Mmm.” He appeared to be asleep, his breath wheezing through his muzzle in irregular time. I knew from the set of his ears that the Rectifier was still listening.
“I am trying to shut myself of the gods in my life. Blackblood has designs upon my unborn daughter. I am being visited by a titanic. I have even come to doubt the value of my connection with the Lily Goddess and Her servants my sisters, as they are allied with my enemies.” Or seem to be. Mother Vajpai’s fighting to lose weighed on my mind.
One pale eye flicked briefly open. “You are human. Those are human gods. I have no wisdom for you there.”
“I am human, and they are human gods, but they afflict me like chancres on a beggar’s mouth.” I tried and failed to keep the bitterness from my voice. “I am no priest to be ridden for a god’s horse.”
This time both eyes flicked open. “No priest, mmm?” His tone conveyed laconic amusement.
“No. And I will be shut of their influence.”
“I do not believe your gods can be shut out, like a door latched against the weather.”
“Something must be done.” My frustration bubbled. “I am taking my life back from the influence of the divine. Divine influenza, more like it. Gods slide into a person’s thoughts until their choices fall away.”
A long silence; then, in a slow rumbling, almost a many-worded sigh, “This has what to do with me?”
“Nothing. Everything.” I paused, collecting my thoughts. Rain drummed on the wagon’s roof, sounding like voices raised in the distance. “I ask not from responsibility but from friendship. You have dealt with more priests than I can count. As allies, as enemies, as targets, as obstacles to be overcome. I would deal with a god, remove his power from my life. It seems to me that you know something of this.”
The Rectifier sat up. From the floor he gathered a rag and began carefully polishing his claws one by one, extending then cleaning them. “You are being foolish, Green,” he said slowly. “Human gods are needed for those with human powers and human problems. Each people worships according to their needs.”
I wondered whose needs the Urges had met, in the darkness before the morning of the world. I wondered whom in turn the titanics had served, besides their own prodigious appetites and strange lusts. A pardine theory of godhood, perhaps, for all that they didn’t seem to have gods as I understood the concept.
“Human gods I have aplenty,” I replied. “I wish fewer of them in my life. You know I will not cast aside Endurance, could not do so even if pressed. I just wish to shut certain doors. Block certain powers. You possess that might and that talent.”
“Might?” He snorted, an almost human laugh. I had never heard the Dancing Mistress do so. “I can stand to fight against a dozen men and walk away intact. I can scale cliffs, swim rivers, and bear down against the weapons of prayer like a warm spoon through cold grease. But I am not mighty. And certainly not against your human gods.”
“You chop logic.” I struggled to keep my voice from becoming sullen. It would serve me no purpose at all to whine at my hoped-for ally. “I know your reputation among priests is infamous. I have seen you stand before the wrath divine unconcerned.”
He rumbled a low noise I could not parse. Then: “Do not confuse foolish bravery with might and power.”
“Still, these gods do not touch you as they touch me.”
“Of course not. You have a soul.”
“And you have a soulpath.” I stared at him in the glimmering darkness of the grain wagon, though all I could see was the flash of his eyes and the folded shape of his power. The soulpath was an aspect of pardine theology and spirituality of which I had only a tenuous grasp, even with the Dancing Mistress’ various patient efforts at explanation. Their kind were born into a family or tribe or grouping-I did not even know that word in Petraean, translation for whatever they called themselves in their own tongue. Each new pardine was feasted into the soulpath of their people. A collective soul, perhaps. Or a herd soul, every individual contributing what was needful and taking what was required, while the whole never lost its collective identity.
Pardines shared a connection with one another and among their people that flowed much deeper than anything humans could lay claim to. Twins, perhaps, such as Iso and Osi, could touch something of the sort. Not the greater run of us.
“I walk a soulpath.” His agreement was almost grudging. “Some among my people would tell you I have strayed.”
“The Revanchists?” I paused, tasting my next thought before I laid it out for him. “They seem concerned with purity. I have known humans of their sort. It’s a petty philosophy.”
“They think me lost,” the Rectifier admitted. “Too long I have hunted among your kind. Any longtime hunter takes on an aspect of their prey.”
I tried to imagine the Rectifier as a human priest. The necessary focus and dedication to a god seemed so terribly unlike him. He did not have that strange gift for embracing contradiction that every priest I knew seemed to contain. To follow a god was to follow improbabilities. How could such a thing as Skinless walk the earth? Of what fabric did the Lily Goddess wreak the miracle of her appearances? How did Endurance manifest, even at my call and with the power I’d harnessed in that moment?
This was the true point of Iso and Osi’s stories, of the Rectifier’s strange ideas about godhood and need, of Desire’s grief as She passed through the world of Her daughter-goddesses. The concerns of gods were beyond me.
All I really wanted now was to be beyond them, and to take my growing daughter safely with me into that refuge. “I have been hunted by gods,” I told him. “I doubt they have much taken on my aspect. It is from their predations I would remove myself.”
“You still struggle with Blackblood.”
“Yes,” I said, somewhat surprised that he understood this.
“Your gods mean little to me, Green.” The Rectifier’s voice was grave. “You risk being a great fool in acting so against your nature. But I will stand beside you against Blackblood if you ask it of me.”
“I shall not stop you from your knucklebone harvest,” I said.
He rumbled another almost-laugh. “No, that you shall not do.”
With that we sank into a quiet that in turn descended into troubled sleep, at least for me, under the staccato rain on our temporary wooden roof.
Morning brought chilly air that recalled all too well winter’s frosts. My hand was a bit swollen, but the fingers had retained their flexibility. The less said of my ribs, the better, though I doubted they were actually broken. I could breathe without screaming. My belly felt bigger, as if my child had grown overnight. Also, I was hungry beyond the point of ravenous. No food would be safe from me until I was sated.
The Rectifier roused as soon as I began to stir. “Do you have a plan to fight the gods?” he asked quietly. “Or will you simply continue to move faster than everyone else and trust your weapons as always?”
“I cannot carry a blade large enough to slit the throat of a god,” I replied. “And besides, I must eat first.”
“I have cured meat.”
He sounded oddly diffident, which I realized was the Rectifier’s way of being polite. “No, thank you. I feel an urgent hunger for cardamom rolls, actually.”
Though I would not risk heading over to Lyme Street with him in tow. We would be too easily recognized-there were not two like the Rectifier, at least not in Copper Downs. Nor me, either. Surely I could find a bakery here somewhere in the brewery district where so much yeast was used that the air always smelled like spoiled dough, and secure some warm treat or another to carry me through my hunger. Once more I longed for a kitchen of my own.