“Why have the people not fled?”
“Some have.” She shrugged. “Others… where would they go? It is a hard road overland to either Lost Port or Dun Cranmoor. There are not many berths aboard ships. People stay, scavenge wood scraps to board their windows, and hope they have enough coal and potatoes to last if the markets are shut down for a while.”
“And no ghosts,” I replied. “I have not felt a prickle of the spell of release that I spoke. No strange power of any sort since spying the Factor’s glamer the first day. If we do not find wisdom in the Temple Quarter, I think we must again go Below.”
Even from a distance, the houses of the gods were clearly in disarray. Broken domes were visible from halfway across the city. The gods might have stirred from their long silence, but they hadn’t yet concerned themselves with matters architectural.
Closer in, the Dancing Mistress pointed out to me the fat iron posts scattered along the east curb of Pelagic Street, which bounded the west edge of the Temple Quarter. “For many years, no one passed within except the consecrated, the very brave, and the foolishly suicidal. Offering boxes were set here for such temples as remained active through the Duke’s reign. People slipped their money in, or hung bags of food for the priests. Sometimes they even prayed. No one crossed a temple door without good reason.”
I remembered Septio from our underground runs. He had been a strange young man, not much older than myself, who had hinted at rivalries and jealousies among the priests who served his god Blackblood.
“Why were they so dangerous?”
“Were?” She laughed as we passed a building faced in slick black tiles. A pair of rusted iron doors stood open, much too tall. “They are more dangerous now. Better organized. In the quiet times, there were-well, tulpas perhaps.”
“Mother Iron and the like?”
“Yes. What do you suppose happens to the dreams of a silent god?”
I considered that. “They might walk into the world, if the god were great enough.”
“Exactly.”
As opposed to someone from the world walking into a dream, as her people did from time to time. “It is tempting to wonder if our world itself is the dream of an even greater mind.”
“As I recall,” she said in her teaching voice, “Mistress Danae had you read Gnotius. That was one of his favorite ideas.”
“Gnotius believed he himself was a dream, Mistress. I am not so sure he passed such judgment on the world, as he did not trust in its existence outside his own mind. That mind was what he doubted.”
She laughed. “Now you know why I instructed you in dance and defense, not philosophy.”
We drifted to a halt before a wide boulevard that drove back into the Temple Quarter. It was lined with great, fat-bellied iron pots, each of which hosted a thin sapling. The pots looked as if they could once have been used to boil sacrifices in some rougher, earlier age. Some were broken open by gnarled old roots that reached down into the pavers beneath, showing that great trees had once grown here.
Temples and priories and more anonymous buildings stood on each flank of the road. I realized this quarter was a small city in its own right. We’d walked past it on all four sides, without ever quite coming this close to it before. The Temple Quarter extended for blocks and blocks. From here, it seemed to have an endless depth.
“The Street of Horizons,” the Dancing Mistress said. “So called, I’m told, because it runs forever.”
“Or at least eleven blocks,” I said, working the city-math out as we spoke.
“Yes, but can you see where it exits the quarter?”
I could not. Which really was the point. “Some old glamer?”
“That, or a very clever bit of architecture.”
That was easy to answer. “If we walk this road running almost due east, we should exit the quarter once more.”
“Of course. The architecture is not that clever.”
I headed down the Street of Horizons. The Dancing Mistress followed close behind. She was letting me find my own way. If I could have smelled magic, I knew it would be reeking here like a building after a fire. Whatever the Lily Goddess had feared might be visible in some fashion. Surely the gods knew one another’s spoor, even across the ocean. Their sight ran farther than that of men, whatever one thought of their wisdom.
That borderline blasphemy in mind, I found the temples crowded together like people in a market. In a Copper Downs market, I corrected myself. If they’d been crowded in the Kalimpuri fashion, they would have built literally one on top of the other. There were few common walls. Divine power apparently needed empty air to serve for insulation here in the chilly north.
Where most of the districts of Copper Downs had a style-reflecting either function, as in the warehouses down by the docks, or form, as in the counting houses along Redwallet Street and elsewhere in the financial areas-the temples enjoyed no unifying architecture. Each reflected the needs or nature of their gods. Gods being what they were, that meant the needs and nature of their worshippers.
The Street of Horizons was no longer abandoned, but it was still very quiet. Small groups of people shuffled to and from the demands of their religions. A man with a donkey cart wandered slowly in pursuit of what little trash was strewn on this road. Three young men with shaven heads led a protesting pig on a long leather leash to some sacrifice.
Little enough happened here. I wondered when these temples saw the bulk of their foot traffic. Dawn services? Was there a Petraean holy day? My readings under Mistress Danae had told stories of every possible combination of sacrament and dedication.
“How many people here worship regularly?” I asked.
“The priests complain of this often,” she told me. “There will need to be a generation born without fear of this place before they see the crowds this street was built to host. People sidle in and out as they find the need, but in Copper Downs, the impulse to divinity is still a very private matter.”
“As it is for your people,” I said.
“We do not worship,” the Dancing Mistress said.
“I know. You follow a path.”
“Yes.” She sounded somewhat miffed, as if I’d stolen a secret. “Worship requires a soul to hunger for the divine.”
I doubted the distinction was so clear and simple, but I would not challenge her. Instead I kept walking, and wondered where the gods were. They did not come out to see me, whatever business they might have been about since their awakening.
If anyone in Copper Downs had recognized the taint of the Duke upon me, I might have thought it one of the gods. While I could not smell magic, they surely could.
Not this day, however.
We found the other end of the eleven blocks without incident. I felt no tickle nor tremble. Nothing. No gods, no ghosts, no in-between northern tulpas.
I was strangely disappointed. Whatever the Lily Goddess had hearkened to, it wasn’t here. Of course, the coils of the Dancing Mistress’ heart didn’t twine through this most human of quarters in Copper Downs. Foreigners and nonhumans were to be found all over this city, but not in the Temple Quarter.
“Nothing,” the Dancing Mistress said in that way she had of continuing conversations we had not actually been having.
“I might as well have been touring the bourses and looking at the corn bids.”
“We did that yesterday,” she said.
At that I had to laugh. Yet the lack of any response here meant we would next seek underground. My ghostly trail of victims would far more easily find me in the darkness below than they would in the busy daylight up here.
“Before we go Below,” I told her, “I would like to make death offerings to the women of the Factor’s court.”
“That is not worship,” she observed.