“They died.” Her voice was hard now. “With and of the Duke. Come now, we must move on. Nothing is for you here.”
She was right, though my legs protested. Whatever I might have found in the rooms of the Pomegranate Court had been wiped out by fire and weather since those first days of riot and blood. Perhaps that was just as well, I thought. The ghosts I could meet down there would be very unpleasant.
I was too upset to climb down the drain. The Dancing Mistress led me to the main gate and a little stair choked with leaves and debris but still passable. We descended into a narrow alley that must once have given access from the street to the blank-faced central tower.
Looking up, I tried to imagine the men who had lived there. How they had thought, felt, why they had taken the lives of so many girls and women with such pain. I knew what sort of men they were. Like the four who had tried to rob me of my purse today. Not the elegant guardians who’d ridden blindfolded with the Factor’s coach, but angry brutes who believed their strength made them right.
What did men like that think would happen to them as they grew old and frail? To their wives and children? Did the world only ever belong to the strong?
The tally of my dead had just more than doubled, with the women and girls of the Factor’s house to my account.
I realized the Dancing Mistress was plucking at my arm. “We go Below now,” she said. “It will be good to be out of the rain.”
“It is just water.” I tried to smile. “I’ve been told that washes away sin.”
“My people do not believe in sin.” Her voice was serious. “There is only circumstance, and choice. Green, you had neither circumstance nor choice when great harm befell this place.”
I nodded, because that was what she expected. As we turned toward the street, something caught my eye. I looked back toward the blank-walled central tower. Someone stood there, half-hidden in the pouring rain.
Tapping the Dancing Mistress’ arm in battle code for rapid reconnaissance, I sprinted toward the figure.
I heard her curse, and realized I’d used a signal of the Lily Blades. Which she would not know. Still, she would follow.
Whoever it was seemed to retreat as I approached. At the same time, they did not move at all. I burst through a swirling curtain of rain to find the Factor-the Duke-standing in the shattered doorway of the tower. The skin of his face was as gray as his rotten clothes. He appeared surprised to see me, then backed into the shadows with one hand raised before him.
He was gone.
The Dancing Mistress caught up to me. “What?”
Shivering, I found my voice. “The Factor was just here.” And why not? “He was dead long before I slipped your words within his ear, Mistress. Surely he still is.”
Like a god, I realized. Ghosts and gods were not so far apart. Especially as the greatest part of their power came from how much a person believed. As with tulpas?
“A glamer.” She touched my face, peering into my eyes in the graying light of the rainy afternoon.
Staring up at the blank bluestone rising between the closing walls of this gateway, I was inclined to agree with her.
Over the next few days, the Dancing Mistress and I visited different parts of the city. I wanted to see Copper Downs by daylight, without riot on my heels. I wanted to understand more of what there was here. At the same time, we set about purchasing various neccessities with her recently procured funds.
“I cannot put the Interim Council off long,” she told me. “Only Federo’s absence has allowed me to avoid them more than a day.”
“Where is he?” We were down in the Dockmarket eating a watery northern curry of some lumpy squash mixed with stewed fowl. I thought these Petraeans should be barred from using the word curry to describe it, even if someone had waved masala powder near the pot as they thought about cooking it.
“Off on an embassy chasing after help to fight Choybalsan.”
“Houghharrow or Dun Cranmoor?”
“Would that it were so. No, he makes a circuit of fishing villages and farming towns. The other cities of the Stone Coast have yet to take this bandit seriously. Federo is begging his spearmen in tens and twenties from little men with little troubles who cannot see past their own bend in the road.”
“A pretty problem,” I said. “But not mine. I would still prefer to hide my face a while longer, in case anyone has a particularly keen memory or a thirst for old vengeance.”
My ship-made blacks were wearying, the wrong texture and weight for my comfort. I would owe the Dancing Mistress a double hand of silver taels for the new ones she ordered for me.
While we waited for my purchases to be ready, we quartered the streets. The Dancing Mistress showed me the compound where she had met a shaman in the days after the Duke’s fall. She told me the story of how she and a Hunt of her people had run him to the ground.
“More of our magic on the loose,” she said sadly. “A forerunner of this Choybalsan.”
I did not sense any stirrings of either the divine or the profane as we passed through the little squatter village beneath the willows of the long-abandoned estate.
So it was. I saw granaries and slaughterhouses and the five armories around the city and streets full of the most ragged poor-they did not call themselves beggars here-as well as the quiet boulevards surrounding the high-walled gates of wealth. We walked the docks, for there was no single Avenue of Ships here as in Kalimpura. We passed by warehouses, factories, bourses, markets, exchanges, moneylenders, public strong rooms, and all the appurtenances of commerce on which a great city must run. Likewise the slips where ships were built and refitted, the parks, the rubbish heaps, the old mineheads now walled in and nearly forgotten, and the Ducal Palace from the outside.
I felt like a traveler coming back to his own home for the first time. Neither was true here, of course-I was no mere traveler, and while this city had been my residence a long while, it was never my home.
Perhaps most odd, all the traveling and talking of places and names made me long for my belled silk. More understandably, at night my empty sheets made me wish for a woman’s arms and a place where I might be whipped freely and in safety.
“Where do women find one another here?” I asked the Dancing Mistress as we walked down the Street of Advocates.
“Wherever they are, I suppose.”
“No, I mean for sport. If a woman desires to be scourged, or loved, by another woman, where does she go?”
“I am not sure.”
The Dancing Mistress was embarrassed. I laughed at her, and began making it my business to catch the eye of the tougher women I met. Some looked back with a certain glint, to be sure, but I would need to work out the safe approach for these people and this place.
I had not appreciated what riches of sisterhood the Lily Blades had offered until they were lost to me.
Changing the subject, I said, “I have seen a few of Choybalsan’s posters, but mostly what they tell me is that this bandit king has a friend with a printing press. The city is fallen on hard times, but nothing desperate.”
“Times will be desperate soon,” she said. “Did you see this morning’s broadsheets when we passed the bookseller on Finewire Street? Choybalsan’s men have broken the altars at the Temple of Air in the Eirigene Pass.”
I knew more of Stone Coast geography than I really cared for, thanks to my lessoning. “That would put him less than three days’ ride from Copper Downs, should he come down the Barley Road by horse.”
“Yes. Have you noticed all the lading down at the docks is onto ships? Almost nothing comes off.”
I thought about that for a moment. “Yes, I did, but I do not recognize the significance.”
“Lading is work for the longshoremen and dock idlers either way. Yet if one sits in a seat of government, that is terrible bad news. There are quiet men with account books who will lecture you about balance of trade. Even the broadsheets talk of it now. In years past, you could not get most Petraeans to understand why money is not the same the world over. Hard times make for sharp thinking.”