Jay Lake - Endurance

“They were…” His voice rumbled, a pardine word being swallowed. “Bound, I should say. And much older than you realize. They carry the same weight of time as gods may do. Slaying either brother by yourself would release enough power to kill you.”

I knew that effect perfectly well from brute experience. Accumulated power didn’t simply leach away harmlessly into the air. “Fair enough,” I said, for again, I had to trust him. “But how will they be stopped?”

“Stopped from what?”

Feeling foolish, I answered, “Attacking Blackblood. I have declared myself their enemy. Surely my errand is of no account for them now.” Though abandoning my wrongful attack against Blackblood would just return the twins to the hunt for Desire’s daughters. Including the Lily Goddess. Which was no improvement at all. I had laid quite a trap for myself.

“Their work feeds their bond. You have put the brothers on a trail. They will hunt that trail until they make their kill. Or until they are thwarted.”

“Iso and Osi are not human, are they?”

He shrugged. “Neither am I.”

That was difficult to answer. Instead, I focused on the problem at hand. “I must now oppose what I have begun with the twins. Then I must find a way to turn the Selistani embassy from attacking the Lily Goddess.”

“Let them all kill each other.”

“No. There is a child at stake.”

He favored me with a curious stare. “You would upset the fate of cities for one child?”

I felt myself grow hot. “If not for one child, then for whom? How many count? If we stop at one, we may as well never try at all.”

The Rectifier raised a hand. Claws gleamed just at the tip of his blunt, furred fingers. “That is a matter for your people to decide. I merely point out how the costs hang in the balance.”

He had the right of it. For the same reason I could not simply charge into the Selistani embassy with blades drawn, neither could I exact my vengeance in a swift series of back-alley killings, nor set the will of two cities against one another.

Some prices truly were too high.

And some were already paid in full.

“I can perhaps solve this problem of Iso and Osi, and also protect Blackblood from my own worst impulses.” I reached within my clothes and pulled out the small velvet bag that contained the Eyes of the Hills. “I must ask you to take something from me, but only for safekeeping. You are specifically charged not to bargain the worth of this.”

He took the sack. “Should I look?”

“As it pleases you. In any case, I wish you to hold them for me.”

The Rectifier closed his eyes a long moment, fingers twined around their small burden. “I know what these are,” he said softly. “You carry a key to a lock you do not understand.”

I was startled at how precisely his words echoed my earlier thoughts. How had he known? Was I that transparent? “And you know where that lock may be found, yet I trust you to carry this key. People will try to take those from me. My position will be improved if they cannot be shaken out of me or seized while I am under restraint.”

“You should not do this, Green.” He slipped the bag inside his own ragged manleather vest. “But I will hold them for you, for the sake of what you did with the ox god.”

A narrow-faced woman brought us two tankards unasked, interrupting our conversation. The Rectifier glared at her until she wilted from his gaze and turned to glare at me. “How much?” I asked, surrendering to the inevitable.

“Two coppers.”

I fished a pair of the smallest taels from my diminishing cache of money. “Enough,” I told the woman. She drew her lips back as if to spit, then wandered away.

The smell was vile. Beer brewed from milling waste was my best guess. I did not touch it. “I bound your people’s ancient power into a human god.”

“Not all pardines agree with the Revanchists,” the Rectifier said mildly. He took a deep draught of his tankard. “Some sacrifices are better left unredeemed.”

“Here,” I told him. “Have mine.” With my fingertips, I shoved the questionable stuff across the little table. “Somehow I would not have expected you to see the world that way.”

“Yet you trust me.”

“I trust you because you fought me until the need had passed, and not a moment longer. You never lost sight of who I am.”

“You have never lived wild.”

I thought of my first days in Selistan, after leaving Pinarjee and Shar behind-my father in his dementia and the woman who was properly my stepmother, however I chose to think of her. I’d lived as close to wild then as ever I would. But I didn’t think that was what he had in mind. “No, I have not. Not as you mean it.”

Another long sip. “I am the greatest warrior of my people in this age, though we are a small echo of what once was. I understand as well as any of us what has been lost. Very few realize what was gained in return when that power was given away.”

Even across the table, I fancied I could still feel the crackle of the gems. I was certain the Rectifier could do so. “I thought it was stolen from you.”

“Could someone steal your spirit without your permission?” His eyes seemed to deepen as he stared at me over the rim of the tankard. “Some things can only be given away, not stolen. However that might be recalled later.”

“The Factor told me that as the Duke he had fought a great war against your people.”

“We are still very dangerous. Once we were far more so.” He took up my tankard. “I would not see those days return. It will be the end of us if they do. In their terror, your people would hunt mine until nothing remained but pelts, bones, and travelers’ tales. Even so, I will guard your treasure, not for that reason, but for your own sake.”

“Thank you,” I said simply. “I must go Below and seek further aid. When I want those back, I will find you.”

“If you need to tell someone where the Eyes of the Hills are in order to spare your own life, that does not trouble me.” He grinned, his mouth all teeth for a moment. “I could use the exercise should someone come searching for them in my hand.”

I took my leave of him then with no more ceremony than a swift farewell. Outside, I knew what I must do next. Mother Iron had already handed me this answer. I found a large sewer grate with an inspection ladder and slipped Below, out of the ever heavier snow and into the dank, sheltering darkness.

Winter cold had begun infecting the uppermost tunnels. I felt as if I wandered through ice. I was tired, while my rooftop adventuring earlier in the afternoon had left me with horribly aching shins and a deep sense of lassitude.

Still, Archimandrix had offered his services to me, and therefore presumably his guild’s entire strength. Mother Iron had indicated that old problems required old solutions. I was coming to appreciate how old a problem Iso and Osi truly were. Not to mention Desire…

I wasn’t sure exactly where I was Below, but I knew the direction I needed. A swath of coldfire in my hand, I headed for the great machines. Archimandrix would be somewhere near there. That was his world. I was only a guest here, far from the lost time in which he and his sorcerer-engineers still dwelt.

Which was fine with me.

The sewage tunnel opened into a larger gallery. Here the flow had been routed through masonry guideways-low walls containing the muck, in order to keep the runoff from flooding into the old mine tunnels. I stepped away from the shallow filth I’d been splashing through and reoriented myself toward the Temple of Endurance.

I walked, noting landmarks such as a great skeleton covered in moss and mold, some eldritch creature that could have served as a mount for Skinless. My thoughts continued to range through the issues bedeviling me. I wondered what the Rectifier would have me do about Endurance, if he could. He’d certainly intervened at the death of Federo and the casting down of Choybalsan. Had the wily pardine rethought his desires? Or perhaps the realities of the situation had simply passed the old rogue by.