Jay Lake - Endurance

“Endurance is not hearing the words,” Chowdry said quietly. “But Endurance does hear prayers, I can tell you.”

I favored the priest-pirate with a sidelong glance. “He was my god even before he was yours.”

“It was you who placed me before the god. I will never be forgetting this.”

“Do you pray in Seliu?” I asked him.

“Sometimes,” he admitted. “But even the Selistani acolytes are wanting to worship and pray in Petraean. In half a generation, Endurance will not be a Bhopuri god at all. Just a Stone Coast god with a few odd words in the mouths of his temple priests.”

I looked back at those blank marble eyes. “I should hope that Endurance would ever be too humble to fall prey to hubris.” That was perhaps the point of seating the god in an ox in the first place.

“What are you wanting here, Green?”

I let that question wash over me, wondering the best way to answer.

He mistook my silence and continued: “You are not coming about to debate theology, or develop ritual. You are not being a builder to raise the temple. And for all your dancing with those terrible women back home, I am sure you were never being so much of one for the gods.”

“I want to stop some plots, and set others in motion.” Vague but truthful. “I have met another god-a goddess, actually-who I would never have thought to see even if I’d spent all the years of my life within a temple. Now I have returned to this god. To my god.”

“He is not being your god.” Chowdry leaned forward and tapped some ash off the end of an incense stick. “He is belonging to all of us, and to this city. You do not see the roots, but they are there already. Settling deep into stone so that he will never be removed except by great force.”

“I know about roots, Chowdry.” My right fingers trailed on his left arm a moment. “Endurance’s roots and my own are in a sun-drenched rice paddy back in Bhopura. Selistan’s sun is our sun. Yours as well. And now I will call upon the god for the sake of my memory and his. If he ignores me, well, I can hardly be worse off than I am now. If he heeds my call, then I will have once more raised a great ally.”

“You cannot be summoning gods as if they were clowns for a children’s party.”

“No. But I can speak to Endurance as if I were still standing between his legs over a dozen summers past.”

I stood and laid my hand flat on the ox’s nose. Closing my eyes, I thought of my grandmother’s funeral-that first memory of my life, before the days began to know their number. The bells of her silk sang the last song of her life. Endurance had plodded along, me held beside the ox in my mother’s arms.

You were there, then, I thought. You bore me up and carried me forward and preserved my history for me until I was ready to write the book myself. Walk with me now.

I caressed the face, from the spot between the eyes down the length of the nose. The horns hung close. I remembered their near-pearlescence in the fiery Selistani sunlight, how on certain days Papa would tip them with woven red balls, one to each side.

I am here, I told the god. Come to me.

Chowdry murmured something, but I did not hear his words. The god was warm and close. As I had before, I could feel him. Wordless, of course, mute as any ox, but filled with intention and divine regard.

How have the pardines changed you? I wondered. Do you feel their high, hidden groves; the violence of their Hunts? Pardine power had twisted Federo well past the breaking point, and birthed the strange, short-lived war god Choybalsan. But if an ox was anything, he was a reservoir of calm. A sink for what might have boiled over from a lesser god. A more facile deity.

Sunlight wrapped me like a heated cloak. I smelled the warm mud of the paddies, the sweet bloom of the plantain trees. My eyes were shut, at least here, where the solid mass of the ox loomed close beside me. Flies buzzed, shit stank, and the air was hot and still, while bells tinkled from some place I could not see.

Very far away, Chowdry spoke once more. Again I ignored him.

I need you, I told the god.

Wordless, the answer came and I still understood it: You will always have me.

Too many mistakes.

There was no response to that. In time, I opened my eyes. Chowdry sat staring sadly at me. “So it is to pray to the ox god,” he said in Seliu.

I bristled with defensiveness. “Endurance heard me.”

“Of course. He is being very… awake. For a god.”

“You have obviously not met Blackblood,” I muttered. “Or Desire.”

“When I was a boy, the gods of my village were safely quiet. We prayed and made offerings of fruit and money, but they never came looking for us.”

“Welcome to Copper Downs. This place has been a nexus of divine power through the Duke’s rule, at least. The new order has not yet settled in. Endurance disturbs that order. Marya’s slaying disturbs it further.”

He shrugged. “I know little of gods. Even of this god I serve.” One hand strayed unthinking to the marble muzzle of the idol. “I am not believing in Endurance. Any more than I am believing in the weather. The god just is. Like the weather.”

“That must be true of all gods.” I stood, balancing my hands on my hips to stretch my aching back. No more rooftops for me. If further fighting was to be had, I’d best array my champions before me. I could no longer carry my own colors.

With that thought, my next steps fell into line in my mind. Inspiration from Endurance, or just the time spent praying serving as a meditative reflection? It did not matter. I must finish organizing my attacks.

Surali’s other men were somewhere in the city. Possibly coming here. My little mob of sailors and refugees could barely be counted upon to watch the embassy, let alone influence its doings. Even with Mother Argai in their midst to lend them both spine and purpose. But if I entreated Archimandrix to set his brass apes onto Surali and the Street Guild instead of Iso and Osi, I could enlist my other allies, who were better suited to the task, to stop the twins. The Rectifier had been watching them for me. I would need him, and through him, some way to secure the temporary loyalty of the Revanchists. Sundering their alliance with the Selistani embassy would be a wise, wise move.

All of this would serve to save Blackblood. Even more so, it would protect the Lily Goddess. And through Her, Desire.

“I shall call upon you,” I told the ox.

There was no answer, as befitted a mute and wordless god.

Outside the weather had reverted to sleet. Needles of icy rain whipped across the temple grounds as if a divine seamstress exerted her chilly wrath. I wrapped my robe close and walked through the construction project to the trapdoor covering my ladder. Chowdry trailed behind me. “You will be having a care,” he said in Petraean.

“I will.” Turning, I drew him into an awkward embrace. We had never been friends of the touching kind. “Surali’s men may come here under arms. I beg you to make a defense.”

“No,” he said simply. “Our innocence is our defense.”

“But you are guilty of so much,” I whispered.

His smile was odd and sad.

I turned, opened the trapdoor in the temporary deck, and descended once more into Archimandrix’s realm.

This time, Below was much warmer and noisier than my recent experience would have it. Perhaps that was only contrast to the dedicated misery of the weather above. Several of the ancient machines in this mine gallery hummed and clattered. Another thing I had not seen or known of before. Blue sparks wafted around the floor-coldfire, in many hands. Some had been set into gonfalons or lantern-topped poles.

The sorcerer-engineers were preparing for war.