On the right, the temple nearly butted against a blocky tan building fronted by squat pillars, which looked older than everything around it. On the left, a slim gap separated Blackblood’s temple from a white stucco wall topped with a gold-colored pediment.
Promising, that. I slipped within.
The shadows showed two brick walls facing one another over a trench of shattered glass, broken furniture, and other refuse. A very strange midden. That was an opening I could climb, though, and so I set my back against the neighboring wall and my hands and feet against Blackblood’s wall to begin my ascent.
No wonder his sanctuary had lacked windows, I realized. Except for the roof, there was nowhere to put them. I had a bad moment with some iron gutters, but then I found myself staring from the outside at wide, short windows in the little hutch on the roof that was the clerestory.
I tried to recall the drop within. Thirty feet, even after accounting for the rise of the front steps from the street level. Banners hung there, so I had a way down.
On close inspection, the windows were hinged to open, perhaps against the summer heat. The wood was silvered and powdery with rot. No one had touched them with paint or glazing in my lifetime, at least. The problem would be prying one open without breaking the glass, or the ancient hinges making a horrendous noise.
With a silent apology to whatever cutler had originally made it, I slid the tip of my boning knife around the rim of one window. It caught hard in two places, so I moved to the next. I had to try four times before I found one that had not been frozen shut from the inside.
I worked very slowly to ease my chosen window out and up. The hinges resisted, then groaned and popped with a spray of rust. Silently cursing, I pulled the frame open past a right angle. I tucked the knife away, set the bell beside the opening, and propped the window with my left hand while I explored where to go next.
I crawled inward to a rafter spanning the gap formed by the interior of the clerestory. Below me, three men in street clothes argued next to the long pool of quicksilver.
Quietly I eased my bell in, then lowered the window behind me. When I looked down, the men were staring upward. One had a pistol in his hand; the other two were unarmed. I could see the question forming in their minds.
No time like the present. I tossed my bell toward the mercury and dropped knife-first onto the pistolier.
Thirty feet is a very long fall, especially toward an opponent who is no longer surprised by your appearance and has his weapon primed and ready. He discharged his pistol. Something slammed me hard in the left shoulder. I spun, forced into a tumble.
I landed on the priest but lost control of the boning knife. It skittered across the floor like a nervous chiurgeon. As I rolled over to fight him, my left arm gave way underneath my weight. Someone kicked me very hard in the wounded shoulder. I yelped, but swallowed it, and tried to curl into a ball. That earned me a pair of kicks to the spine. Then they decided to talk.
“By all the wounds of Martri, I think he’s killed Sextio!”
That was punctuated by a kick so hard, I felt bile surge in my mouth. I tried to ease past the corner of the pain that had taken my shoulder.
Another voice: “No. This is that girl of Septio’s again. Small wonder the Pater Primus is so afraid of this one.”
“Well, and crap. If Sextio’s dead, we’re even shorter handed, with all the others Primus took.”
“It will soon be over.” That one walked away, calling over his shoulder, “Throw her to Skinless. Let the god take her up if he can. Everyone should have a last meal.”
“I hate this,” muttered the kicker. He grabbed my heels and began to drag me. My pain multiplied. Then he dropped my legs to step away a moment. I had some swift fever dream of freedom, until the bell fell on my chest. It was beaded with dollops of mercury.
I saw my face distorted by the curve of each little mirror. My body bumped over flooring and a few steps, while my shoulder grew cold. My appearance seemed to change, become in one bit of quicksilver a farmwife like that wretched woman Shar, back on Papa’s farm. In another, I was a priestess standing before a glittering altar, my face tattooed with silver tears. In another, I wore a helmet of strange design and swung a sword that crackled with lightning.
On and on, like the faces in the lilies of my dream. I would become a hundred tiny imperfect copies of myself. Was this how the titanic gods and goddesses had felt when they splintered?
A slab of metal boomed close by. An iron door, some part of me realized. I looked up at the priest in his ill-fitted doublet with the pimple on his nose and murder in his eye. “You will all die,” I told him.
“Everyone dies.” He pushed me into a hole. I fell hard into darkness.
I awoke in deep night.
All is lost! I had not gone to our ambush even with my own little knife, let alone with Skinless.
Skinless. That name made the rest of my body as cold as my left arm. I knew it was there, for it pressed against me, but it might as well have been cleaved off by an angry girl with a boning knife.
Night, or a sacred labyrinth in a temple cellar where no one had bothered to set the gaslights burning.
Something was very, very close to me. Something that did not breathe. I tried to open my eyes, but they were already open.
Black, black as Below without coldfire. Black as a pain god’s heart.
A snuffling noise. Dampness close to my face. A smell like meat in a sudden, overwhelming wave as if my nose had woken up.
“Skinless,” I whispered. “You know me.”
Which was a lie, of course. I’d fought him as he’d dragged away the Dancing Mistress. Nothing had been right since.
A huge pair of hands closed on me as if I were a poppet. A rough tongue licked at the blood on my left shoulder, granting me new agony in exchange. This time I let myself scream. Why not? Nothing was left to hide. Not here, at the end of things.
We moved. Whatever Skinless required a theopomp for, it did not seem to need Septio today.
“I took him into my arms the day before he died,” I whispered. “Was he your friend?” My breath was ragged in my chest, though I could not say if this wave of pain was from my injured body or my wounded heart. “When death could be cheated no more, I gave him the gift of mercy.”
My thoughts were clearing. Hours on the rack beneath the whip had granted me a certain perspective even when my mind was under assault. There was nothing of pleasure about this pain, but I’d met such intensity before and kept my head.
We raced, twisting and turning and occasionally jumping. Whatever the path to the god’s bed, it was larger than the space that contained it.
Gods were always larger than the space that contained them.
No wonder Federo is mad beyond lunacy. Vessel for a god. Divine catamite.
I pitied him then, even his murdering madness. Did he crave his times in the city, when he could pretend normalcy even amid the scheming?
The Factor spoke up in my memory. “Peace,” he said, “and prosperity and quiet streets at night, and silent gods who could not meddle daily in the business of men.”
Peace filled this quiet darkness. I wondered if Blackblood should have been silent all these years. People knew pain regardless of the god. They would know more pain under Choybalsan. He had burned much, for all that his farmers and bandits worshipped him. Choybalsan would do anything.
By the time Skinless laid my body down again, my resolve had returned. It vanished momentarily in the renewed pain of weight on my shoulder, but I knew how to find myself amid suffering.
A light flickered, forcing me to shut my eyes a moment.
When I opened them again, Skinless was fumbling with a bit of smoldering punk, moving from bowl to bowl, lighting the crudest sorts of oil lamps. I found it odd to see this shambling horror stepping to the task like some chambermaid preparing for her lord’s return.