Jay Lake - Endurance

Osi’s honesty was disarming. “Yes. Much easier. But we are challenged in our work, just as anyone who pursues a quest must be.”

Iso: “So we shall lay aside some rituals, and make additional time for others.”

“No god will strike you down, I think.”

“We are not struck,” Osi said. Something in his tone plucked at my thoughts, but I could not place it, and so dropped the subject as I already seemed to be pushing beyond the edges of their comfort.

Afternoon passed in shafts of dusty light that walked slowly across the warehouse’s cavernous interior from narrow windows set high in the walls. First these battens gleamed, then those grates, and for a while a pile of brass binnacles flashed like gold. I spoke more to the brothers, and spent time in my own silences as they attended to their meditations. Though they were mendicant, and seemed to possess little, what they did own unpacked and opened and refined and subdivided into smaller and more manifold belongings. For example, a small satchel revealed a collection of tools. The handles of each opened to smaller tools and firestarters and tiny blades.

It was a very efficient sort of asceticism. I recognized some of their implements as having violent use. A corkscrew can open a wine bottle, but it can also stab an eye or breach a throat. Osi and Iso moved with the practiced ease of old professionals in any field. It was so simple for me to see the Blade mothers in these two men, for all their differences.

I wondered if I would ever be free of the shadows of my past. Was anyone in truth ever liberated from the bondage of memory? A question that dogs me still, all these years later.

But we did talk. Some of our discussion was of Copper Downs. I explained the Temple Quarter as best I could, and the clever architecture that made the Street of Horizons, a mere eleven blocks long, seem to be endless when looked at from either margin of the quarter. The gods, how they’d slept under the old Duke and been awoken at his mysterious death-omitting my central role in that event-and how they had since pushed for power. I’d been away in Kalimpura for much of that awakening, but my own encounters with Blackblood, the past attempt to assassinate Marya, and the very presence of Endurance alongside the traditional pantheon were taken together more than sufficient to upset the established order.

The brothers in turn talked about the doctrine of theogenic dispersion. This I knew of from my readings in the Factor’s house, how the titanics who were the greater gods at the beginning of the world had fallen away and sundered into their children and their children’s children, just as a shattered jar will birth generations of splinters on a tiled floor. Much along the lines of my own recent meditations.

“Just as Father Sunbones and Mother Mooneyes,” I said at one point, recalling a pair of theogenic tales that spoke of the birthing of Desire’s daughter-goddesses, but from a very different perspective.

“Yes,” Osi said. “We listen to the rituals, and we learn the tales told in each place we visit.”

Iso added, “By marking the differences in the traditions over time and distance, we can chart something of the spread of the story.”

“Likewise the gods themselves.” Osi, again. “Every city has a sailor’s god, and one who watches over farmers. We believe these to be aspects of the same facet lost in the Splintering of the Gods.”

“Your Endurance is an exception,” Iso told me. “We find that ilk of gods most interesting, for they can tell us what aspects of godhead arise independently, and what must descend from the earliest times.”

His brother spoke again. “Someday our devotional charts will give us a map of the theogenic dispersion. From that we can trace our way back to the site of Father Sunbones’ garden. Eventually we can learn of both the miracles and the errors which occurred there.”

“All thinking creatures were grown to flesh and ensouled in that garden,” I mused, remembering my own reading. “I assume it for a metaphor of the richness of the world.”

“Some metaphors are as real as the world itself,” said Iso. “Never dismiss something simply because it is used to make a point.”

I sighed, a long, slow exhalation that caught their attention. “The world is a bit too real for me right now. My troubles are very much not metaphorical.”

Osi made that small sign with his right hand again. “We are not of this city, and know little of its people and their cares, but we can hear you out, if you wish.”

So I explained, as much for my own benefit as theirs, about my exile from Kalimpura, more of the fall of Choybalsan, and my time away. Then I touched on the arrival of the Selistani embassy, and Mother Vajpai’s attempt to kidnap me. I told them of Surali, the Bittern Court woman, and how her thirst for vengeance in the matter of Michael Curry’s gems fit into the appearance of the Dancing Mistress and the pardine Revanchists, drawn by their own interest in those same gems. They liked my thought that the problems of the embassy and the Revanchists might be turned toward one another. Then I began explaining my complex relationship to Blackblood. That quieted the twins to a deep and thoughtful silence.

In time, my words ran out. They stared like a pair of cats on a fence. We watched one another awhile. Finally, I said softly, “Thus I run from one problem to another, and solve none of them.”

“By your own statements,” Osi said, “we take you to be a fighter.”

“Yes.”

Iso: “You do not run from opponent to opponent, slapping first one then another, only to leave them to cut at you from behind.”

“No…”

His brother, again. “It is not our way to fight. Our rites are strict.” I should have known that for a lie then, by the way they moved. “But as your path is that of the application of force, you might consider applying force.”

“Just as we would apply our rites and meditations,” said Iso.

“Force does not mean a fight,” I answered. “Force can be so many other things.”

“Precisely,” they replied in unison.

Osi glanced at the deepening orange light now flooding almost vertical across the upper part of the warehouse. Outside the sun was setting. “Time comes for our deeper observances. Perhaps we shall encounter you again soon?”

I stood, bowed, and thanked them. “You gentlemen have granted me a needed respite, and given me time to consider my situation. Thank you.”

Each pressed his palms together as if praying. “Of this, think nothing,” said Osi.

Walking away, I mused that they had given me no useful advice at all concerning Blackblood. Another time, perhaps. Or just as likely, their unwillingness to speak to the question was advice in and of itself.

I passed slowly through the streets, pretending to be a tired lad at the end of his workday. That was not far wrong, and hunger called. The baby wanted food and so did I.

The endless errand these twins pursued in life was poetic enough to fascinate. It reminded me of the Dancing Mistress’ words not so long ago about how far one might flee in the world, when I’d wondered if taking a fast ship and sailing away truly was the wisest option. She’d said, “Until you reached a desert or a mountain spine your hull could not cross. There you would not speak the language, or know the money. You would wind up begging beside some purple dock amid people who speak with feathers and curse one another with flowers.”

Even then, that had seemed an almost desirable fate. Wandering the world, witnessing legends of the fall of the titanics so that the splatter of collapsing godhead could be rendered across a map of the world-such an errand that would be. A quest for the ages.