Jay Lake - Endurance

The audacity of the larger plot was almost overwhelming. Plot-within-a-plot. Or more accurately, a plot-outside-a-plot. Much as in the twins’ view of the divine, layers played into layers in this matter.

At the core, Surali was making a play for me to satisfy her personal vengeance, and possibly the Bittern Court’s, for the way I’d handled the killing of Michael Curry. They’d not won the Eyes of the Hills as they’d hoped. Even so, the gems had been secured with the key I’d thrown into the harbor back in Kalimpura. I pitied whoever had been forced to dive to recover it.

Wrapped around that was a larger effort to overthrow the Lily Goddess and shift the balance of power in Kalimpura toward the Bittern Court and their allies. Specifically including the Street Guild and its longstanding rivalry with the Lily Blades. That effort seemed to encompass an attempt to assassinate the Lily Goddess. Which would, among other things, well and truly put paid to whatever place of safety the women of Kalimpura could hope to find. Let alone those from the rest of Selistan with the courage to come seeking aid.

Laid around all that was a larger effort to stalk the daughters of Desire. The Saffron Tower sought to overthrow what it saw as the error made at the beginning of time when Father Sunbones had allowed his daughter Desire to exercise Her free reign in the garden. At least, that was the man’s tale. As I’d first read it in Goddes amp;e Theyre Desyres, the story had concluded with a warning to women and their goddesses.

Passing another layer, wrapped around that was the effort to stalk Desire Herself. The titanics were long gone from the affairs of the world, or so we who lived in these lesser days were taught. But the old, old anger of men and their gods at the rebellion of women was very real.

Stop Desire from continuing to raise daughter-goddesses at need, and you would stop the thread of subtle power that united and protected women wherever on the plate of the earth the writ of the old titanics ran.

And to do all this, Surali and the Saffron Tower would casually overthrow both the political and divine order of Copper Downs. The sheer effrontery of this offended me. The intersection of a hunt as old as time and a political conspiracy of this generation of power in Kalimpura was deeply unfortunate. My presence at the heart was even more unfortunate.

Or had the Lily Goddess intended this all along? Had Her mother-goddess, Desire, intended this? Was I only and ever a weapon forged, honed and drawn for this moment?

Such thoughts brought me past the verge of illness. I stumbled in the snow, placing my hand on a wall as I toppled past the verge and spewed my guts. Not so much there, in truth-the pears from before, and whatever orts I’d snatched at the beginning of the day.

I was no one’s tool. I’d fought and killed to escape being used. The idea that my entire life was of someone’s making, even beyond the slavery of the Factor’s house, was enough to set my heart racing and my imagination spinning until my head felt fit to burst.

With a chilled hand, I wiped the vile, stinging tang from my lips and moved on. While I’d been thinking, my footsteps had carried me back toward the Temple of Endurance. Why did I need Chowdry now?

But I didn’t need Chowdry. I needed the god.

Despite my gloating earlier about slaying the Duke, there was no fire I could raise against Iso and Osi. Not at their age and power. Even the Rectifier might be crushed beneath the weight of their wills. Archimandrix would only be a distraction. At most, I’d warned Desire, though it was inconceivable the goddess had not already known. She was a titanic. She could surely see their every step.

Why She didn’t just act against them directly was beyond me. All magic had rules-sorcerous or divine. I didn’t suppose it was mysterious for a goddess, even a titanic, to be bound by those rules.

But Endurance… Endurance was not sprung from Desire, nor any titanic. My ox god had not even arisen from the human impulse to religion. I’d instantiated him with the stolen power of ancient pardine Hunts, their braided soulpaths filtered through four centuries of the Duke’s iron grasp on the numinal affairs of this city.

Whatever magics and weapons Iso and Osi deployed would be less effective against my Endurance. I hoped.

I swept through the open gates of the temple to ask my father’s ox to protect me one last time. And through me, so many others.

The afternoon brought a stinging trace of frozen rain by way of reminding me that winter was here. As if I could have forgotten. Also, more of that raw wind. Chowdry’s acolytes had abandoned their construction project under threat from the weather. I heard singing somewhere inside the tent encampment, but I ignored the music. Instead I stepped up to the door of the wooden temple and passed within.

The bead curtain parted at my touch. The ox statue sat where I’d last seen him placed, amid his incense burners and guttering tapers. My belled silk still lay between his forelegs, an offering of my entire life, in a way. Which I supposed was a strange echo of the truth. The hangings on the wall had changed-more added and the rest rearranged. The air smelled of incense and oranges and the slightly rotten odor of rain-soaked wood.

I stood quietly before the ox, so close I could touch his muzzle. The impression of a stable was still overwhelming. And still more than a little amusing. Endurance in life had been a creature of the sun, the water, rice paddies and ditches and the stubbled margins of our little walkway back toward the road to town. Pinarjee, my father, could no more have built an enclosed stable like this than Endurance would have sheltered in it.

Yet I was coming to a renewed appreciation of the relationship of gods to place. Desire had shown me that, as had Iso and Osi in a different fashion. No one in Copper Downs would understand a god who stood in a rice paddy. But a stable was a meaningful symbol to anyone who lived in this land of cold winters and long spring rains.

Carefully I reached out and brushed my fingers across the ox’s nose. I almost expected it to be warm and damp, as in life, but that was just an illusion of the moment. Prayers were tied to the horns as I’d seen them before. I hooked a few off, curious what I’d see. It didn’t feel like snooping-in one strange sense, I was an avatar of the god Endurance. Or perhaps the god was an avatar of mine.

I laid that uneasy thought aside for consideration at some future date. It didn’t need to trouble me now. Instead I read the prayers I’d taken.

I want for Nitsa to rest easy

That one stirred my heart, for Nitsa had died in my place. I gave the ox a long, thoughtful stare.

I am sorey for what I did to the Merchants’ dautter

Please give me a better chance

Green needs peace, her world is too driven

The last one stirred me all over again. I found myself both angry and sad at the same time. I crumpled the prayers, each on a little slip of foil-backed paper, and bent to feed them to a fat, slow beeswax candle burning with the faint scent of oranges almost beneath Endurance’s chin. One by one the prayers flared with blue flame. They curled to ashes as they reached toward the ceiling.

When I was done, I rocked back on my heels. Much as when I was a child.

“Do you suppose the god is hearing them better that way?”

Chowdry’s voice, speaking Seliu. I heard the clack of the bead curtain immediately thereafter. I considered palming my knife, then realized that if Chowdry wished me ill, he wouldn’t inform me of that by stabbing me in his own sanctuary.

“In truth, I am not so sure the god hears prayers at all,” I answered as he came to squat next to me. “Intentions perhaps. Actions certainly. But what are prayers except packaged hopes? And what god will deliver hope when we are here to care for ourselves?”