Jay Lake - Endurance

I reached the bottom of my ladder to be confronted by two figures with leather-wrapped faces, eyes goggled and mouths muzzled. It occurred to me that with their guises these priests could be any race of human. Petraean. Selistani. Or something older and more furtive. They were accompanied by a brass ape that shivered and clicked. Though I was certain about the ape, I had to assume the other two were men. No woman I knew would allow herself to smell so.

Neither of them appeared to be Archimandrix, but that was hard to tell with the tattered robes and the leather straps and the brass oculae.

“I am Green,” I announced in my most imperious voice.

The men nodded. The ape just clicked some more. When they turned to walk away, the ape followed them. So I followed the ape. Its great legs pistoned like the armatures of an engine. Something hissed within-however they had powered this thing, the magic or natural science of it was beyond me.

A regiment of these armored suits would have its uses in defense, but I could not imagine them being effective attackers at the best of times. Defeating them would not be easy work, but the tactics could not be too challenging.

Could they?

We arrived at a machine that glowed the color of coldfire. The faint blue light crackled along the device’s brass and iron limbs. A man was strapped within. His body was gaunt, each rib as countable as a tooth, his penis dangling shriveled from a groin tattooed in concentric triangles that ran across his thighs and abdomen. His chest was tattooed as well, tiny letters in a script I didn’t recognize scrawled across his body in a testament to… what?

Only his face was hidden, wrapped in leather with the brass eyepieces.

Archimandrix, of course. I stared up into the gleaming blue formlessness of his lenses. “I have returned.”

“Ah,” he gasped, then shrieked fit to split the heavens.

I covered my ears until the piercing noise dropped off. The two beside me did not stir, though the brass ape clanked and settled a bit in its stance. When Archimandrix was finished, he gasped again before licking at the blood trailing from the corners of his mouth.

“Your mysteries are deeper than those I know of,” I said politely.

One of my guides reached up and began to unbuckle the bonds holding Archimandrix into his machine. After a moment he stumbled to the cold stone floor, dropping to his knees to retch. His back was covered with the same tiny scribing as his front. The skin there was spotted with welling drops of blood where a hundred or more needles had punctured him in the machine’s embrace. Nausea grabbed at me. I turned away and tried to hold down a sympathetic lurch, but I lost my own battle.

When I turned back, mouth tainted with stinging bile, the sorcerer-engineer was pulling on a quilted robe. “I am sorry,” he said in a strangely normal voice. “You should not have seen that.” Fluid dripped from his brass muzzle. I reflected on how difficult it would be to vomit in such a contraption.

“I have decided I do not need to know.” My fervor stained my voice. If Archimandrix noted it, he did not remark.

“We have brought all the apes out of storage.” One of his silent assistants handed the sorcerer-engineer a small wire brush, which he used to clean his muzzle as we continued to speak. The rasping of the tool lent his voice a strange distortion. “Some of our best have been working on their punchleather instructions.”

“Are you ready?” I asked. My fear that Surali might pack up her embassy and leave was growing stronger. They held three hostages of great import to me behind those walls.

Archimandrix waved one hand, as if brushing off objections. “We will never be as prepared as we might prefer, but we are ready.”

I realized that his fellows were gathering around us as we spoke. Fair enough. They should all hear this. Time for my vision to begin falling into place. “We spoke before of the twins and the temples. But I have rethought my plans. Tonight, in the middle watch, I want your apes to surround the Selistani embassy. It is a rented mansion in the Haito style, at the corner of Richard Avenue and Knightspark Street. There may be some of my countrymen out front, watching the place; and a woman of my order named Mother Argai. She speaks no Petraean. Some of the men do. Together they are watching the gates for a departure. I must recover two other women of my order as well as a young girl from imprisonment by the embassy guards.”

“We are to attack them?” Archimandrix asked. The flickering blue light of the place lent him eerie highlights.

“Almost certainly, though do not swarm the walls or break through the gates. Rather, stop them if they attempt to leave. They will seek to make their way to the port. I cannot have them taking ship until I have recovered my people, and put an end to… certain plans.”

“Your god killers.” His voice was flat now, flat as his machines.

“My god killers,” I said, owning up to Iso and Osi. “I have other intentions for them now. More, well, spiritual. Along an axis of power where their strength does not lie.” Pardines, and Endurance. And, by the Wheel, Mother Iron if I could find her and once more truckle any sort of aid from her. She was the soul of this city, I had come to believe almost literally so.

A strange notion was dawning about her. I wanted to let my deeper thoughts tease the idea out before I plucked at it. “The twins cannot be allowed to take ship either. Too much is at stake.”

“We have not moved openly in the city for centuries,” Archimandrix said. “And never against our own.”

“These are not your own. I am asking you to take on my people, not Petraeans. Besides…” I could not help the grin that seized my face. “The Interim Council will bear all costs or charges arising from these actions. I am driving inimical forces out of the city at their commission.”

That was about as far from the truth as I cared to venture, for all that it was not yet exactly a lie.

Archimandrix looked back at his gathered sorcerer-engineers. “What say you brothers?”

“Much is at stake,” I put in. “If we do not act, the Interim Council will fall.” If it has not already done so. Lampet had raised the Reformed Council to be met with an aggravated helplessness by the assembled sages at the Textile Bourse. “The Temple Quarter will be in disarray yet again. Even worse, the greatest danger to order which has been seen in an age will prosper here.” Before passing onward to wreck my own city. After wrecking my own city. I was indeed a woman under two banners, however much I sought to deny either or both of them. I cradled my belly with my hands. “I want more for my daughter. Each of you wants more for yourself.”

A rumbling arose, the sorcerer-engineers speaking a language unknown to me. Short, sharp gutturals echoed, offset by vowels that buzzed as if they used the cords deep in their throats without benefit of lips or tongue. I knew a chaffer when I heard one. The Blades used to do this on occasion. We would meet as a body to overwhelm a difficult decision with dozens of individual voices, separate opinions, smoothing together like rocks in a sand barrel until they’d reached a consensus as if by summoning it from the very air.

Much more quickly than I’d imagined, the muttering died down. Archimandrix turned to me. “We will be there. How will we know your hostages?”

“Two women of my order,” I said. “Prisoners on the second storey, last I was aware. Everyone there but a few servants will be my countrymen, so do not assume that any dark-skinned female is your goal. The names of these women are Mother Vajpai and Samma. Also, a girl of about twelve, of your country. She is pale, with sandy hair in curls, and eyes somewhere between blue and gray. Her name is Corinthia Anastasia. The women will be expecting a rescue, and can be relied upon. The girl is not so wise or prepared, I should think.”