Passing another layer, wrapped around that was the effort to stalk Desire Herself. The titanics were long gone from the affairs of the world, or so we who lived in these lesser days were taught. But the old, old anger of men and their gods at the rebellion of women was very real.
Stop Desire from continuing to raise daughter-goddesses at need, and you would stop the thread of subtle power that united and protected women wherever on the plate of the earth the writ of the old titanics ran.
And to do all this, Surali and the Saffron Tower would casually overthrow both the political and divine order of Copper Downs. The sheer effrontery of this offended me. The intersection of a hunt as old as time and a political conspiracy of this generation of power in Kalimpura was deeply unfortunate. My presence at the heart was even more unfortunate.
Or had the Lily Goddess intended this all along? Had Her mother-goddess, Desire, intended this? Was I only and ever a weapon forged, honed and drawn for this moment?
Such thoughts brought me past the verge of illness. I stumbled in the snow, placing my hand on a wall as I toppled past the verge and spewed my guts. Not so much there, in truth-the pears from before, and whatever orts I’d snatched at the beginning of the day.
I was no one’s tool. I’d fought and killed to escape being used. The idea that my entire life was of someone’s making, even beyond the slavery of the Factor’s house, was enough to set my heart racing and my imagination spinning until my head felt fit to burst.
With a chilled hand, I wiped the vile, stinging tang from my lips and moved on. While I’d been thinking, my footsteps had carried me back toward the Temple of Endurance. Why did I need Chowdry now?
But I didn’t need Chowdry. I needed the god.
Despite my gloating earlier about slaying the Duke, there was no fire I could raise against Iso and Osi. Not at their age and power. Even the Rectifier might be crushed beneath the weight of their wills. Archimandrix would only be a distraction. At most, I’d warned Desire, though it was inconceivable the goddess had not already known. She was a titanic. She could surely see their every step.
Why She didn’t just act against them directly was beyond me. All magic had rules-sorcerous or divine. I didn’t suppose it was mysterious for a goddess, even a titanic, to be bound by those rules.
But Endurance… Endurance was not sprung from Desire, nor any titanic. My ox god had not even arisen from the human impulse to religion. I’d instantiated him with the stolen power of ancient pardine Hunts, their braided soulpaths filtered through four centuries of the Duke’s iron grasp on the numinal affairs of this city.
Whatever magics and weapons Iso and Osi deployed would be less effective against my Endurance. I hoped.
I swept through the open gates of the temple to ask my father’s ox to protect me one last time. And through me, so many others.
The afternoon brought a stinging trace of frozen rain by way of reminding me that winter was here. As if I could have forgotten. Also, more of that raw wind. Chowdry’s acolytes had abandoned their construction project under threat from the weather. I heard singing somewhere inside the tent encampment, but I ignored the music. Instead I stepped up to the door of the wooden temple and passed within.
The bead curtain parted at my touch. The ox statue sat where I’d last seen him placed, amid his incense burners and guttering tapers. My belled silk still lay between his forelegs, an offering of my entire life, in a way. Which I supposed was a strange echo of the truth. The hangings on the wall had changed-more added and the rest rearranged. The air smelled of incense and oranges and the slightly rotten odor of rain-soaked wood.
I stood quietly before the ox, so close I could touch his muzzle. The impression of a stable was still overwhelming. And still more than a little amusing. Endurance in life had been a creature of the sun, the water, rice paddies and ditches and the stubbled margins of our little walkway back toward the road to town. Pinarjee, my father, could no more have built an enclosed stable like this than Endurance would have sheltered in it.
Yet I was coming to a renewed appreciation of the relationship of gods to place. Desire had shown me that, as had Iso and Osi in a different fashion. No one in Copper Downs would understand a god who stood in a rice paddy. But a stable was a meaningful symbol to anyone who lived in this land of cold winters and long spring rains.
Carefully I reached out and brushed my fingers across the ox’s nose. I almost expected it to be warm and damp, as in life, but that was just an illusion of the moment. Prayers were tied to the horns as I’d seen them before. I hooked a few off, curious what I’d see. It didn’t feel like snooping-in one strange sense, I was an avatar of the god Endurance. Or perhaps the god was an avatar of mine.
I laid that uneasy thought aside for consideration at some future date. It didn’t need to trouble me now. Instead I read the prayers I’d taken.
I want for Nitsa to rest easy
That one stirred my heart, for Nitsa had died in my place. I gave the ox a long, thoughtful stare.
I am sorey for what I did to the Merchants’ dautter
Please give me a better chance
Green needs peace, her world is too driven
The last one stirred me all over again. I found myself both angry and sad at the same time. I crumpled the prayers, each on a little slip of foil-backed paper, and bent to feed them to a fat, slow beeswax candle burning with the faint scent of oranges almost beneath Endurance’s chin. One by one the prayers flared with blue flame. They curled to ashes as they reached toward the ceiling.
When I was done, I rocked back on my heels. Much as when I was a child.
“Do you suppose the god is hearing them better that way?”
Chowdry’s voice, speaking Seliu. I heard the clack of the bead curtain immediately thereafter. I considered palming my knife, then realized that if Chowdry wished me ill, he wouldn’t inform me of that by stabbing me in his own sanctuary.
“In truth, I am not so sure the god hears prayers at all,” I answered as he came to squat next to me. “Intentions perhaps. Actions certainly. But what are prayers except packaged hopes? And what god will deliver hope when we are here to care for ourselves?”
“Endurance is not hearing the words,” Chowdry said quietly. “But Endurance does hear prayers, I can tell you.”
I favored the priest-pirate with a sidelong glance. “He was my god even before he was yours.”
“It was you who placed me before the god. I will never be forgetting this.”
“Do you pray in Seliu?” I asked him.
“Sometimes,” he admitted. “But even the Selistani acolytes are wanting to worship and pray in Petraean. In half a generation, Endurance will not be a Bhopuri god at all. Just a Stone Coast god with a few odd words in the mouths of his temple priests.”
I looked back at those blank marble eyes. “I should hope that Endurance would ever be too humble to fall prey to hubris.” That was perhaps the point of seating the god in an ox in the first place.
“What are you wanting here, Green?”
I let that question wash over me, wondering the best way to answer.
He mistook my silence and continued: “You are not coming about to debate theology, or develop ritual. You are not being a builder to raise the temple. And for all your dancing with those terrible women back home, I am sure you were never being so much of one for the gods.”
“I want to stop some plots, and set others in motion.” Vague but truthful. “I have met another god-a goddess, actually-who I would never have thought to see even if I’d spent all the years of my life within a temple. Now I have returned to this god. To my god.”