Jay Lake - Endurance

“Will you wait with us while we ready ourselves?”

“No, I must sort my other allies.” I glanced up the ladder, and decided I’d be better off heading for the Tavernkeep’s place through Below. Too many up top knew me, might be looking for me. Besides, that way I could watch for Mother Iron.

Or Skinless.

I could not decide if I wanted to see Blackblood’s avatar or not. That hand I would let fate deal to me.

“Farewell.” Archimandrix bowed deeply. Behind him, dozens of his fellows followed his obeisance in a rustling of robes and a creaking of leather. Their lenses flashed with the faint blue-white of coldfire reflections as they rose again, each head moving in an eerie, precise unison with all the others.

“Farewell.” I pushed through them toward a familiar passage leading east and south.

Several turns away, in the Station, I stopped and pulled out my short knife. I needed Mother Iron, and I could not be sure she’d find me of her own accord. Whatever ritual might call her wasn’t something I knew, either, but I thought I could summon the Factor’s ghost. And he was definitely allied with Mother Iron.

Libations are the oldest ceremony. Warriors had honored their dead from history’s first battlefield, just as families honored their elders who had taken the longest sleep. The wine of a libation poured into the opened soil was nothing more than a symbol for blood spilled in combat to run into a freshly dug grave.

I had no wine, and the earth beneath my feet was stone, but blood I did have. The blade fit my right hand as well as ever it did, then turned around to slice across my left palm. I clenched my fist around the stinging pain. Blood filled the cup of my hand in a sickening rush.

When I opened my fingers, the red pattered down upon the floor in a slow, silken rain, black as old sin in this underground darkness. “Factor,” I whispered. “You are never so far from me. You stand behind all the great conspiracies of my life. Even now in death the shadow of your power writhes through this city, drawing gods and god killers and assassins from across the sea. In name of my debt to you and in the name of your debt to me, I call you now.”

It was no ritual, but the words felt right. I’d known the man in life, and I’d known him better in death, as he had passed over at my hand. We were bound as surely as any parent and child.

“What debt do I now owe you?” The Factor loomed next to me as if he’d been there all along. He still wore his semblance of living, though I could faintly glimpse the stone of the passageway through his body.

“You owe me your life,” I told him.

“Which you took unknowing. I do not see that as debt.”

“I released you from an ancient power not your own, and freed you into the next world.”

He laughed gently. “You always were one with novel ideas about how things work.”

“Where do you suppose I learned them?” In a strange way I felt almost sympathetic toward this man, the source of all my torments.

“We all make mistakes.”

Nodding, I agreed, “I am doubtless making another mistake now. I need your help.”

“You? Slayer of dukes and gods? I thought you ate cities for breakfast.”

“No. I eat rulers for breakfast. Cities give me indigestion.”

“How shall I ease the rumbling in your gut, Emerald?”

His use of that name very nearly closed my ears. I ignored the flash of anger that shot a tremor through my hands. “I am confronting another problem of the divine.”

“God killing?”

“God saving, actually.”

“You play both sides of the fence well enough.”

I shook my head ruefully. “I would rather not have the fence in my life at all, but I am afraid it is too late for that. But now, on this side of the fence, I have need of Mother Iron.”

He paused awhile, as if thinking through his next words. Erio was a ghost a thousand years older than the Factor, I was sure, but the Factor had lived centuries longer than any man might expect, which lent him an unusual substance in the afterlife. How that experience bore upon his thoughts, I could not say. It must have granted him an involuntary wisdom at the least.

Finally, the Factor spoke. “I will not bandy with you about Mother Iron. She is much older than even the farthest extent of my knowledge.”

“I do not believe she is so much more ancient than the sorcerer-engineers.”

“Tinkering fools,” he said dismissively. “Boys toying with brass and wire. Mother Iron is something else. Older. Deeper. ”

“I have seen you in her company.”

“Yes…”

“I would speak with her.”

“She does not respond when bidden.”

“Unlike ghosts?” I asked, my voice nasty. “I never believe what people say. Not when they act the opposite. You can find her. Bring her to me.”

“Even for me, it does not work that way.” Something of a smile played across his face. “My powers are far more limited than you seem willing to credit.”

“I have no idea what your powers are, in truth. Not here in this place, at this stage of your existence. I just know you have a bond to Mother Iron.”

At this latest mention of her name, Mother Iron stepped up to my other side. Her furnace eyes glowed as if from a deep distance. As always, I received the impression that her cowl concealed immensities far larger than the space it enclosed.

“Welcome,” I said modestly.

I received an indifferent stare for my troubles.

“I am hurrying to defeat a plot against this city.”

The Factor snickered, I swear he did. Mother Iron only continued to stare. The fires in those deep-set eyes were not even shuttered by a moment’s blinking.

“Another god will be stricken soon, if we do not move. And…” Here I took a breath, readying myself to play the strange card that had occurred to me earlier. “I know how to restore you to a portion of your former power.”

That was a knife throw in the dark if I’d ever taken one, but all the same, not unreasonable. Something flared in her eyes. It was the opposite of a blink, as if the fires within had been unbanked to briefly rage beneath a rain of oil.

A hit, then.

I used my own silence. Not as a weapon against her, for I could no more fight Mother Iron than I could fight a storm, but as a tool. A lever, cracking her open.

“You do not have that authority,” she finally said. As it had always seemed to do, her voice gusted deep from within a large, hollow place, bringing oven-hot air with the words.

“No, but I know of one who does. Here in Copper Downs, now.”

“Her…”

The Factor’s ghost looked both bemused and puzzled in the same moment. His lips parted as if he wished to speak, but at a sharp glance from me he swallowed whatever he had planned to say. Even the ghosts feared me.

“Yes,” I replied to Mother Iron. “Her. And She speaks to me. You remember Her, from the beginning, don’t you?”

Mother Iron sighed, a rumbling that reminded me of the collapse of a mound of coal. “Not the very beginning, no. But yes. I remember.”

“The days of the titanics. You are no daughter-goddess, or splinter of that era.” My thoughts ran ahead, dragging my words with them through fields of theory and foggy banks of speculation. “You are from another creation, spawn of another Urge. Much as the pardine gods were.”

“You presume.” Mother Iron’s voice was hard, but carried no threat.

“I only speculate. But you have persevered, borne upon the prayers of sorcerer-engineers and existing within the echoing places of this undercity. Carried along into the currents of time without ever recovering your proper place in the depths.”

“Vanity is for men.” Her objection carried its own weakness embedded in the tone and power of the words.