Jay Lake - Endurance

However, when I turned the corner into the brick-walled alley with its familiar cracked flagstones now damp and slick, the area before the tavern entrance was full of people. Humans, not pardines. And Selistani at that. Chattering, almost angry, a buzz of voices arguing in Seliu.

Startled, I tugged up my hood and dipped my face. I was far too easily recognized with my scarred cheeks and notched ears. Until I understood what mischief this restless crowd was about, I did not want them to know me.

I eased into a crowd of men in white linen kurtas, a few women in colored sarongs scattered among them. My black leather would have been more conspicuous if they’d been paying much attention to me, but these people were focused on a woman standing in the doorway of the Tavernkeep’s establishment, arguing both with someone inside and with several men outside.

Moving closer, with a cold stab of my heart, I recognized the one at the heart of this brangle. It was the Bittern Court woman, whose name I had never known. How wrong I had been in my sense of being safe from her. Nameless, she was only a power to me, a persecutor. This woman had pursued me to exile back in Kalimpura, while calling for my head over the matter of Michael Curry’s assassination. I owed the Bittern Court no loyalty and even less affection for their conflicts with the Temple of the Silver Lily, not to mention their attempts to persecute me. To see her, here, could only be very bad news indeed.

No wonder I’d felt a need to sharpen my knives this morning. I would be lost to the Wheel before I would place myself under this woman’s influence.

Pulse pounding, I backed slowly through the crowd, pushing toward the open street beyond. Someone bumped me, then shouted out my name in Seliu. This was not the time to confront whatever had brought people across the Storm Sea in search of me. I ran, sprinting out of the alley, down past the Cooper’s Brewery, and away on the stones of the city. I might not have been as fast as before, but I was still faster than those behind me.

Winded, but safe, I paused for breath in an empty lot near the old wall, now simply a dividing line between the Greenmarket and the Ivory Quarter. Crumbling bricks rose forty feet to a walkway that joined four surviving towers. It was pretty enough, in a desolate way, and a tribe of indigenes had made their stick-and-daub homes atop the walkways and tower crowns, so that the whole thing looked as if it had been colonized by enormous raptors.

A firecart offered meat sticks, while the strange little people who lived atop this section of wall passed in abundance on their own errands. No Selistani were in evidence.

I fished out a copper tael from my limited supply of coin and bought a length of some birdflesh. I didn’t ask what fowl, and the man did not say. It tasted mostly of charring, and a bit of sage, but that was enough for me in the moment. My hands were busy and I looked as if I might belong there.

Truly, I needed to stop wearing black leather. That was like a fart at a temple service-marking me out and making people stare. I resolved to purchase a colored wrap at the very next opportunity, and decide later how to be safely anonymous on a more consistent basis.

I pondered whether Chowdry had known that the Bittern Court woman had arrived across the sea from Kalimpura. Persons of her status did not voyage alone, either. He’d said important people had arrived from Selistan, some mission or embassy calling here at Copper Downs. It was beyond unlikely that I would not be involved in their purposes.

Had Chowdry brought me back to Copper Downs only to betray me?

Or had the Selistani stranger asking after me at Briarpool been searching on behalf of the visitors?

Perhaps it did not matter so much, except as concerned future trust between me and Chowdry. Enough that I was here. Enough that a woman who’d tried to claim my life back in Kalimpura had made a challenge in one of my safest places. Not particularly welcomed there, from the look of things, but still, she had come to me.

I fingered the hilt of my long knife. This was Copper Downs. We had no Death Right, and not so much in the way of governance these days. She would be hard-pressed to hire locals to kill me, unless they were complete fools. Anyone she had brought with her would be lost here until they learned both the streets and the local customs. I knew Below, and they did not. I could take her far more readily than she could take me.

This was my home ground.

Simply slaying the Bittern Court woman out of hand, either quietly or publicly, had much to recommend itself as a strategy.

My child moved at that thought, and I caught myself. I had only days ago dreamt of a quiet life of cooking and peace, and here I was now plotting another death. That for the sake of my convenience.

I needed help, I realized. I could not pursue this on my own, not if an entire embassy had arrived from Kalimpura. Endurance might be of some aid, but my trust in Chowdry was provisional until I could understand what he had known before he came up to see me at Ilona’s cottage. Not just what he had known, but more to the point, what he might have failed to tell me.

Any mission of note from Kalimpura would be accredited to the Interim Council. While the councilors were venal bastards to a man, they were venal bastards with whom I could work. Furthermore, they did owe me.

I headed for the Textile Bourse, seat of the Interim Council ever since my slaying of the Duke had vacated the palace on Montane Street. The Lyme Street building was a fraction of the size of the old palace, and crowded to the rafters with clerks and ministers of government, but it had thus far kept them free of the taint of the old regime, free to create their own, novel disgraces.

The building had not been fully repaired since the day last spring when we brought the god-king Choybalsan down from the roof. Almost six months past, now. His lightnings had shattered much of the facade. As for the damage to the street, I’d accounted for that personally. The cobbles I’d broken had since been filled in with gravel to keep the street traffic flowing while presumably someone sought funds for more permanent repairs. The shattered windows were boarded over, while the front door was replaced with stout, iron-banded oak. The flowers that had sprung up full-grown with Endurance’s theogeny were long vanished.

The banner of the city still hung overhead, a copper shield in four parts, surmounted by a coronet and a ship. As I’d assumed, the Interim Council had not relocated during my time in the High Hills. That was confirmed by the two very large guardsmen at the door. They were the sort of accessory that served as a timeless classic in the halls of power.

I paused at a little teahouse I did not remember from the days of struggle. That was not so long ago, yet it felt like half my life had passed since. Just outside the teahouse, on the edge of the street itself, small round tables of lacquered wood perched on twisted metal legs, inviting me to take my ease in ironwork chairs. A twinge in my back reminded me that I hadn’t sat like a civilized person since leaving Ilona’s cottage. Nor had I enjoyed any tea, let alone the rarer vice of kava, a habit I longed to acquire in detail some day just for the sake of the steamy brown richness of the stuff.

The streets were no place for me to linger, but neither could I dash into the Interim Council with nothing more on my mind than a panic at seeing a tradeswoman from across the sea. I compromised by taking a chair in the shadows next to the rippled glass window. That position carried an excellent view of the Textile Bourse while keeping me relatively anonymous. For once today, the black leathers would work in my favor.