Jay Lake - Endurance

“Vanity is for all things that carry self behind their eyes. Gods are vain, men are vain, cats are vain. But this is not vanity.” I pitched my voice for her, ignoring the Factor’s increasingly sardonic smile. “This is opportunity.”

Mother Iron’s tone changed. Words creaked as if bouncing down a mountain. “What would you of me?”

“Accompany me to meet Desire. Accept Her charge if She will lay it upon you. Then cloak Her power in yours and help me to stop the god killers that hunt Desire’s daughters across the plate of the world. When we are finished, you will have stature again.”

“Or my fires will be banked forever.”

“All opportunity is risk.” I opened the aching, stinging hand I’d slashed to summon the Factor’s ghost. Blood dripped. “Everything worthwhile comes priced too high for our tastes. This is the way of the world, Mother Iron. Live in it. Or hide beneath the shadows.”

I had no better offer to make her. Either she accepted my argument or she did not. In any case, my evening called me, a midnight appointment to be at blades with the forces of my chief tormentor.

Mother Iron made a slow, steaming noise, like a kettle on the hob. Then, to my surprise: “Take me to Her. I would see this power for myself.”

“Of course.” I glanced once more at the Factor’s ghost. He mouthed the word vanity at me. I nodded at him as if accepting a compliment.

Even now, that would gall him. Being dead, his amusements were few. My refusal to be baited was salt in his never-healing wounds.

Walking Below with Mother Iron was very different. There was no sense of menace. I was one of the most dangerous human beings in the city, but the denizens of Below were their own class of risk. Nothing stirred when Mother Iron walked those dank halls.

I carried my coldfire always as any sane person did Below, at least any sane person who relied on her vision to navigate. Mother Iron’s burning gaze swept the darkness ahead of her with a vague orange glow. That was a bit unnerving. The light caught on things I did not usually notice, given that I’d never been Below with a torch or open flame. Glittering compound eyes tucked into the vaults and arches beneath which we passed, for example. Narrow slits of shadow at waist and shoulder height, primed for traps or hidden bowmen to fire through. Chips of bone scattered along the edges of the floors, as if whoever had died down here over the years had lain too long for even the scavengers.

I ignored these things, for they did not threaten me this day. Even the close and stale air fled before her approach. We followed the Sheep’s Head Cutoff, then picked up the Whitetop Street sewer line to approach the Temple Quarter from Below. I wasn’t sure how comfortable or safe Mother Iron would be walking the street openly.

Which was, admittedly, not my trouble to resolve.

“We will emerge at the grate behind the Shrine of Indulgences,” I said, breaking the silence that had followed us since we had left the Factor’s ghost behind. “That’s about two blocks from the ruins of Marya’s temple.”

Mother Iron turned her head toward me, but said nothing. I’d already begun to doubt my plan-fusing an old power outside the purview and descent of the titanics with Desire’s daughter-descent. An analogue of how I’d called Endurance into being, really, sidestepping one set of problems by folding them into another.

But I’d made Endurance, for all practical purposes. Mother Iron came with centuries-millennia-of her own power, her own traditions, her own fate. For that matter, so did Desire.

I realized I was like a child who imagines two leaves and a stick to be the same as a boat, fit to sail filled with cargo and men down a rushing river to the infinite sea. I had done a simple thing, terrible and portentous as it was, in raising Endurance into the world. Now I proposed to do a far more complex thing.

We reached the grate I expected. I looked up into the gloom of late afternoon sullen through the bars at the top of the ladder. “Follow,” I told Mother Iron, not knowing if that was a command, a request, or wishful thinking.

I climbed. These rungs were metal, sunk into the dressed stone of the shaft. Pitted, corroded, mossy, they stung slightly at the palms of my hands. Still I reached the top and clambered out. The sleet had given way to fat, slow snow once again. I could tire very quickly of winter, I realized. Especially when it was me forced to race about in all weathers at all hours.

Looking down, I saw Mother Iron climbing like a furnace on legs. It would not have shocked me had she simply risen up the shaft, but her hands-such as they were, hidden in the folds of her robe-and her feet brought her up into daylight just as anyone else’s would have been forced to do.

When she came out to the surface, I noted how the snowflakes sizzled and popped when they landed on her. I’d only ever seen her in sunlight once before-the day we’d stood off Choybalsan and slain the god, along with my old friend and enemy Federo. One body, two minds. Or so I had told myself.

She was squat as ever. I imagined a walking stove, though Mother Iron certainly appeared to possess the usual number of arms and legs. That cowl was just as deep in daylight. It still seemed to contain far more space than its outside dimensions would suggest. Even the cloth of her cloak was oddly textured, as if it had been fabricated of metal, or at least pounded on an anvil instead of woven on a loom.

No one was about in the alley except for a three-legged dog rooting through spilled garbage. With a grunt, I flipped the grate back into place. Then we headed toward the ruins of the temple.

Mother Iron still said nothing.

As we approached the Temple of Marya, I noticed that the few other people out in the last daylight amid the increasingly foul weather avoided us. They passed by the other side of the street, walking in long careful curves that took no notice of who was approaching. Just as people will avoid a madwoman in the road without remarking on her.

Or a Blade, trained by deicides, skulking to avoid the notice of a goddess.

They were stepping around Mother Iron, of course. I wasn’t certain what her seeming was for other people. Sometimes the avatars and godlings of this city moved cloaked in invisibility, much as Skinless himself could apparently roam with discretion despite his enormous size and horrifying visage.

Unease, it could just be unease.

We reached the jumble of bricks and shattered timber. Snow and sleet had alternated sufficiently to make a gray-brown slush of the ruins. That was now being overwritten by more freezing rain dumping even as we stood. My earlier offerings were gone, no doubt scavenged by whoever had passed here since I’d taken Laris back to the lazaret on Bustle Street.

“Here,” I said to Mother Iron, then stepped up onto my ragged chunk of masonry, which had served me as both lectern and altar. “Third time pays for all.”

“Nothing pays for all,” she rumbled.

A joke? Couldn’t be. “Can you climb up here with me?”

Her joints popped with an audible metallic echo as she stretched to top the rock. Once again, up close to her, I was struck by how hot Mother Iron was. Snow and slush at her feet sizzled to water, then flowed away.

Looking back across the years, I now know that this was one of the better ideas I had ever had. At the time I was nearly panicked at the potential for disaster.

“Desire,” I said, shivering. “Goddess.” I reached into my vest and pulled out the last of the jewelry I’d stolen earlier. So much for hocking it for spending money. I scattered the rings and earrings on the ground. They disappeared into the snow, leaving only dark little holes. “I call You once more, this time the last. I have brought You an answer, someone who can stand against the Saffron Tower and those who would avenge the insults they have pursued since the first days of Time himself.”