One was, to my surprise, Mother Argai. The other three I knew, but not particularly welclass="underline" Mother Adhiti, Mother Gita, and Mother Shig. Mother Adhiti was by far the largest woman in the Blades, and one of the biggest human beings I had ever met. She was mostly muscle. Whipcord-thin Mother Gita rarely spoke. A pink scar seamed her face, giving me a sense of kinship which I immediately recognized as false. Mother Shig was harder to understand. She was small, her complexion almost gray, and she bordered on the misshapen. Even so, she climbed better than I-one of the few in the Temple who could.
Mother Shesturi only nodded and said, “Welcome.” The others muttered, except for Mother Gita, who stared a long moment and then seemed to forget me.
Blades on patrol dressed to be noticed. We wore light armored skirts over leather trousers, blouses of a triple-woven fabric slick to the touch, and knee-high boots. Everything was black. We didn’t strut abroad like members of the Street Guild working protection, or the Claviger Caste searching for criminals escaped from bond. Our patrols were in alleys, through potshops, down into the Below, and back up again.
At first, I didn’t know what we were looking for. I followed Mother Shesturi and her handle high and low through Kalimpura. I already knew how people on the street made way for the Mothers of the Temple. Now I understood why.
A Blade handle on the move was frightening even to me, and I knew these women.
We returned home that first evening with not a dozen words exchanged. We touched no one, caused no fights, ended no fights. We had simply been present, at different times and places all over Kalimpura.
“Target practice in the shooting hall a span before sunrise,” Mother Shesturi announced as we sat in the running room to change into our Temple robes.
That night I had little time to do anything but sleep. I didn’t touch up my costume, or consider venturing out.
The next morning we shot early with bows and crossbows. Mother Shesturi worked us until we had each achieved a tight group with both weapons on all three ranges.
“Run at noon,” she said when we finished up. Time for a bath, then we were on the street again.
So it went for a week straight. The other women of the handle began grumbling, except Mother Gita, who continued to keep her own counsel. After several days, Mother Adhiti looked me over closely. “Surely you are being old enough to mind yourself. How dangerous are you?”
One night we ran to a dozen small havens. Mother Vishtha had told me of them-lean-tos and sheds and hollows, and occasionally entire apartments or offices, scattered across Kalimpura for Blades to seek out if they met with trouble. Our handle checked them from a distance, then sent someone sidling close to certain ones. Being small and swift, that usually was me.
“It is death, you know,” said Mother Argai as I shimmied down a drainpipe from checking a rooftop.
“What?”
“We tell no one. Not even the rest of the Temple. The Blades have very few rules, but one is that we never tell of the small havens except to other Blades.” She leaned so close she could have kissed my ear. “That rule may save your life someday, Green.”
The eighth day we ran, this time well into the evening, was the first time I’d seen a handle meet with trouble. Mother Shesturi brought us up out of the Below behind the Plaza of Broken Swords, right where I’d come up after killing Michael Curry. We came to ground in front of the mango grove I remembered all too well. A group of men squatted beneath the trees with bare steel in hand.
Twelve men, I counted quickly, and noted the best three swordsmen by their stance. Six of us. I was too short-armed to face any of these in a stand-up fight. I wasn’t sure about Mother Shig, either.
Mother Shesturi made the same assessment. She barked our names in order, pointing as she spoke. I was on the right edge of the group, with Mother Shig. I carried only my pigsticker, though the sworn Blades all bore swords.
“Go away home, boys,” Mother Shesturi told them. “Your beds are getting cold.”
The leader held his sword loosely at his side. “The soldier women of Kalimpura.” His Seliu was terribly accented, though the words were right. “I wondered if you were real.” He called out to his men in some language I did not recognize.
Their blades came up.
Mother Shesturi nodded. “No one walks away.” She meant no rules. Faces, joints, necks, hearts, guts. However the enemy presented himself to you. Whatever you needed to drive him down.
Mother Adhiti waded in first. Three of them fell back to draw her on. She kept moving past the springpoint of their trap. Then I lost sight of the others because Mother Shig and I were closed on by two grinning men. They laughed to one another as they came for an easy kill.
Mother Shig sprang into the air, legs splayed wide, and brought her sword down above the guard of one of the attackers to split his face open. He fell screaming as she hopped onto his chest, her heels drumming into his ribs.
His partner turned with a snarl. I slipped the pigsticker in below that crest of bone that rides at the waist, in front of the hips. His armored berk ended a little too high for its intended purpose. The man shrieked and tried to swing back to me, but my blade grated against his hip. I slugged him right next to the embedded blade, then kicked him in the back of the knee. The fighter went down in time to receive Mother Shig’s sword point inches deep into his ear. He kicked twice, then died noisily.
I pulled free my bandit blade and went for the back of another man engaged with Mother Argai. He never saw me coming. I took him with an upthrust to the kidneys-they obviously did not think to be fighting people as short as I still was then. Mother Argai used the momentary respite to slash the throat out of her second attacker. Her third caught her in the shoulder, a rage-filled blow that tore through the black shirt and opened her to the bone.
She collapsed with clenched teeth sucking in a shriek. I stepped close inside her attacker’s swing and took his wrist on my own shoulder. His sword flailed as he punched with his free hand. The knife that I hadn’t seen snagged on the left sleeve of my shirt. I smacked my head hard into his chest, then smacked him there again, trusting Mother Shig to arrive.
Arrive she did, announcing herself by shattering the man’s sword arm. He fell screaming next to Mother Argai, who put her dagger in the soft underpart of his jaw with her off hand.
Then it was over. I couldn’t have counted to twenty through the entire length of the fight. Eight men were dead, one more dying with a wet, wounded bubbling squeak. Three would continue to breathe so long as Mother Shesturi was moved to allow them.
Mother Argai was down with the slashed shoulder, bleeding very badly. Two of Mother Gita’s fingers hung by a flap of skin. She silently pushed them more or less into place, then wrapped tight a strip of cloth.
I tore a cloak from one of the dead men and began to bind Mother Argai’s shoulder. Mother Shig sprinted away at a word from Mother Shesturi.
In this city, even the cutpurses would stop to aid a fallen Blade. Unless she was alone and there was no chance of being caught. Now that the fighting was done, people were drifting into the park. Mother Shesturi deputized half a dozen good-sized men to stand on the necks of the survivors.
Then I realized I was hurt, too. Blood was spattered all down my left sleeve. That side was growing numb.
Mother Gita squatted down next to me and touched the wound on my upper arm with the fingers of her good hand. I nearly passed out from the pain. “Good work,” she said, then began packing dirt into my wound.
Dirt? I thought.
The world whirled in darkness.
“We run as we do so no one will know where to find us,” said Mother Shesturi to me three days later.
“That hardly seems effective,” I mumbled.