I rang the bell awhile, but nothing happened. No flash of light, no creaking of the Wheel, no manifestation in the street. Just me, a foolish girl with a little wooden bell, which I finally dropped.
“Thank you for your offering,” Choybalsan said. Even gods could be sarcastic. He bent down to stroke his burned fingers in the blood.
That was when I realized the bell still echoed.
The god heard it, too. He glanced at my own bell, cast aside. He looked past me. Something changed in the set of his body.
Clutching closed the wound on my arm, I stood and turned.
Endurance walked slowly down Lyme Street. Though I knew him to be dead and gone, he approached with the steady pace I remembered from the first days of my life. His bell, his real bell, clopped in time with the fall of his feet.
My grandmother sat astride his back. She was wrapped in her cloak of bells. Except my grandmother was never so tall.
I looked carefully and saw a tail sweeping away from the hem of the cloak.
The Dancing Mistress.
I opened my mouth to cry gladly, then shut it again. A stream of pardines came out of alleys and side streets, so that in moments a crowd of her people followed behind-far more than I had ever seen. Dozens. Scores.
The three who had fought with me-the Rectifier, the Tavernkeep, and the tan woman-rose from their hiding places and stepped quickly to stand beside the ox. Chowdry followed them, drawn perhaps by the familiar costume my teacher wore.
What had she done?
What had I done?
The lightning died. Choybalsan stood tall, beside me now as the two of us stood together to meet the coming challenge.
The Dancing Mistress slipped off her cloak of bells. I saw this was not my grandmother’s belled silk, that I had mistaken it so only because she was astride the ox. Endurance’s eyes gleamed as he pitched his head toward me, ringing his bell again, but he did not seek to call me back.
She handed the silk to Chowdry. Though it seemed he could move only one arm, he took the cloth and gathered it close as best he could, before giving me a long look of mute appeal.
“Federo,” the Dancing Mistress said.
“Choybalsan,” the god corrected her.
She slid from the back of the ox and walked toward us. “You have something that does not belong to you. Something that was never meant for men.”
“Whoever this power might once have belonged to, it is mine now.” He flexed his ruined fingers, then pointed to a building down the street. A single bolt of lightning struck the roof, breaking off shattered bricks and smoldering splinters.
“That trick grows old,” I found myself saying.
He looked at me with a set of his eyes that chilled my blood once again. “You are both here. Together you are the keys.”
“No.” The Dancing Mistress was at arm’s length now. Her people had followed close behind, the ox Endurance with them.
I did not hear the wheezing bellows of his breath as I had always known them. That was when I understood that I had succeeded in reaching out to the divine. My measure of grace had spoken, my piece of the Duke’s power. Endurance was not a sending so much as he was a calling.
A quiet, voiceless god of patience, if he survived long enough to grow as I understood that gods could do.
The Dancing Mistress went on: “There are no keys. You are a flawed vessel. Like a water crock into which someone has poured the red iron of the forge. You were never meant to hold this power.”
The Factor stepped close. His shade flickered. I could see the pardines disturbed him. “Release the power, Federo,” he said. “This has mastered you rather than you mastering it.”
“No.” Choybalsan began to quiver. I could taste metal in my mouth once more. “No, I will not let go!”
The Dancing Mistress’ claws came out. “You cannot be touched by weapons, but I have a hundred of my kindred behind me. I assure you that we can lay claws on you until you are nothing but a ribbon of blood in the street.”
Patience. Every time this dispute came to blows, somehow affairs grew worse. I had the habit of killing people, but this was both more and less than that.
We did not need to kill this god. We needed to persuade him to lay himself down.
“Please,” I told the Dancing Mistress. “Please let me try.”
I took Federo’s hand as the god within him raised his other arm to call down more wrath. He tried to snatch it away, but somehow could not. Instead he turned to look at me.
“You came to claim me, thirteen years ago.” I gripped his fingers close, as if he were Papa and holding tight could have saved me back then.
“That was the man Federo,” he rumbled in the voice that made my ribs ache.
Ignoring him, I went on. “I hated you for it. You were kind enough, and spared me good words, and fed me better than I had ever eaten in my life. Sometimes, for a child, that can be enough.”
His eyes held a distant, almost lopsided look. “You were a wise girl.” I heard the man inside the god.
“Now I have come to claim you back. Whatever love you hold for her ,” and with that word I cast my eyes toward the Dancing Mistress, “whatever love you hold for me, let that be enough for you to follow me as I once followed you.”
“I do not know how to let go,” Federo whispered. Sparks crackled within the god’s eyes. He shoved me away. I owe my life now to the fact that it was the man who pushed me and not the god, for I merely fell to the stones of the street instead of skittering half a block to the sound of shattering bones.
A stampede erupted. I curled tight as dozens of clawed feet pelted past me in a sudden burst of movement. For a panicked moment, I closed my eyes. I was too cowardly to face my death.
What came was not the shredding of my body, but the tearing noise of lightning slashing the air. I tasted metal yet again. All the hairs on my skin stood like spikes. Thunder clawed at my ears until only a heavy, smothering silence remained, though the stones beneath me carried the sound to my bones, echoing much as the god’s voice had.
Goddess, I prayed, a mercy on us all.
I opened my eyes to see the divine Endurance standing over me, much as the ox had once done in my father’s fields. Just beyond his front legs was a terrible roil of spark and flame and fur and claw. Pardines exploded under the stabbing bolts of lightning, flesh and blood and pelt shredding in arcs leading away from the violence.
My eyes were driven toward blindness from the glare, much as my ears had been from the noise. I capped my hand over my brows and tried to look only at feet.
That was bad enough. They clawed, fought, climbed. Skinless’ great muscled legs passed my view. Lightning flashed and glared off the blood slicks on the cobbles. My whole body felt a bruising from the ripping electrick bolt, the buffeting of the wounded air.
Then there was no more. The lightning had stopped, along with everything else. Even in my deafness, I could sense that a hush had descended. I crawled out from beneath the ox, and with my right hand on his flank, got to my feet.
Carnage. Dead pardines everywhere. Skinless lay shattered, still as any anatomist’s worktable project. Only Endurance and I stood.
The Dancing Mistress lay before me, coiled with Federo. She’d managed to bang his head into the cobbles sufficiently for reason to leave him. With his thoughts fled, the lightning had ceased.
It was indeed Federo. The aspect of the god had drained away.
The Rectifier loped up to me. He had a slender stone knife in his hand. I saw his triangular mouth flex as he said something to me that I could not yet hear; then he bent over to slice off Federo’s fingers.
I launched myself at him, slipping on a slick of blood. Though my attack was wild, and he far, far larger, I took the Rectifier in the side of the leg and staggered him two paces away from Federo with the corpse yet unmutilated.
He whirled on me with the knife held low, then pulled his blow when he realized who his attacker was. The Rectifier bent, the knucklebones in his fur jiggling. He asked me a question. This time I heard his voice as if from a long, hollow tube.