Jay Lake - Endurance

I closed my eyes and thought of Marya, the Lily Goddess, Laris, Mother Vajpai, the fat woman at the lazaret, Ilona, and least of all-or perhaps most of all-myself. Women. Goddesses. Desire’s daughters and granddaughters.

Everyone who’d served Her, and needed Her, and been under Her protection.

A traitor thought demanded my attention, distracting me. Is Mother Iron female?

That was between the two of them. “Desire,” I said aloud again. “I offer a solution to the problem which has dogged You down the generations. Raise up a goddess from a different path to power, and face those who persecute You with a different weapon in your hand.”

I do not use weapons, She whispered more quietly than snow thunder. Her voice was the wind.

Not Laris this time. Though my mouth once again tasted of metal. “You are leaving us already.”

It costs much for Me to appear.

“Then see this one I bring before You. An ancient protector of the city. A woman of a different era and kind. A power in this land, who can close the divine fracture in this place before it grows too wide. Mother Iron, I present the titanic Desire. Desire, I present the autochthonic Mother Iron.”

I felt as if I’d gone to some dinner party of the gods, and made introduction between two rival thunderbolt hurlers.

Wind swirled around us, much as it had in the Temple of the Silver Lily when the Lily Goddess had manifested. Snow crystals flew up from the broken stones, or were drawn down from the sky, until we stood in the core of a frozen vortex. Mother Iron steamed as the stuff melted from her cloak on contact. I felt myself becoming buried. Strangely, my body was now blessedly blood-warm.

The wind took the shape of a woman-familiar, pulsating, shifting through all women, all races of human, all shapes and heights. You would be My daughter-goddess? She asked in a voice made of this private storm.

“No,” said Mother Iron. In her word I heard rusted metal doors slamming shut, cutting off ovens full of screaming souls, burning charnel houses blocked from view. “I would protect this city.”

The storm gusted, sighed with lungs the size of clouds, the shape of fate. Do you deny Me?

“No.” Again, a clang of finality. But these were immortals bargaining over divine power. Likely their words carried meanings far beyond what my ear could understand. “I do not deny you. But neither am I a daughter of your line.”

Not human. Not of the titanic descent.

Were we ourselves sprung from the gods? I laid that thought aside for future consideration alongside other troubling ideas.

The storm hummed further. Mother Iron reached out, her cloak slipping from one bony hand so that I saw fingers like metal pistons, a wrist motivated by chain and pin and axle. Was she quite literally a machine? Who had made her? Perhaps Archimandrix’s first and greatest ancestor.

“I will take your charter, but I will not bow to your high place.”

“Exactly,” I hissed. “Step outside the ancient feud.”

Now the storm laughed. The very air shook. The stones beneath my feet seemed to slip, ready to walk of their own accord. So finally it is time for a change.

They came together then, in that vasty place I had only barely ever glimpsed, where time echoed like a stone dropped in a well and the world was the size of a fingertip. I watched as the forces met. Goddess and tulpa swirled together as the water of two different seas will where they merge, until only ocean remains, ever changing and endlessly unchanged.

Finally, after seconds, after an eternity, the two pulled apart again. All the hair on my body smoldered. My eyes felt as if lightning had danced within them. I did not know if I would survive this experience, and found I did not care.

Instead I dropped to my knees. “Mother…” I whispered.

The hand that reached for me was not quite the same. I could see the mottled, corroded metal, but it flexed beneath a form that gained density even as I looked. Skin, the opposite of Skinless really. Though on Mother Iron it seemed to be just another cloak. Still, rosy nails and a hue almost as brown as my own showed where before there had been only in truth an ancient, creaking machine.

“Rise,” she said. Her voice was still distant ovens and banked fires, but now it came from bowed lips that I could just barely glimpse within the shadows of her cowl. If she were to pull back her hood, Mother Iron would be both beautiful and terrifying in the same moment.

I stood. We were in the street, myself bone-cold and soaking. The bricks of Marya’s shattered temple lay arrayed around us in a circle, like straw in a field after a whirlwind. No, not a circle. A spiral. With Mother Iron and myself at the center.

Already the joyous transports that had taken me up were fading. Already my sense of captivation was transforming to a sense of having been captive. All of this was about freeing myself from gods, not binding myself closer.

At least I had served the women of this city well, as a Lily Blade should.

“I am not yours.” My voice was quiet.

“All women are mine,” she answered. “But you serve others.”

“I do. And I must rouse more of them.”

“Do what you need. This is my temple now. I shall abide until it is time.”

Reluctantly, I walked away. A part of me wanted to hate her. I imagined nursing a resentment and a sense of blind folly that would push this force away from me. But another part of me wondered how it might feel to have the whole of Below, the entire undercity, as your sacred place, then be folded down into a smaller and smaller package until you fit into a spiral of bricks in some back alley.

Like a bird descended from the high airs and a wide view of the plate of the world to sit in one tree and think small thoughts. Would I have chosen the same?

No, of course not. I had refused this exact choice, turned away from this opening of the mind and soul. It would have torn me apart surely as any coney in the talons of some great falcon. Mortal women were not meant to be vessels of such power.

I hurried through the evening’s sleet and freezing rain. It was a proper storm, too, much to my disgust. The Tavernkeep’s place abided, awaiting my small pleasure as my choices narrowed toward nothing. The midnight hour would bring me to some end.

No watchers lurked in the alley. I sighed at that, realizing that I’d been looking forward to taking my frustrations out on someone properly deserving. On the other hand, it meant I would be out of the nasty weather all the sooner. Pushing within, I saw that almost no Selistani remained in the tavern. I wondered where they all were. Then I realized that Mother Argai had likely chivvied more of them out to stand watch. A rescue was needed, and I was sending them, if not real troops, at least walking armor under the leadership of Archimandrix. That boy knew this city far better and deeper than did either my allies or my enemies.

Pardines there were in plenty, though. Revanchists, from their half-wild look, and city-bred alike. Somewhat to my surprise, I did not glimpse the bulk of the Rectifier. Perhaps the old rogue was off haunting the twins’ warehouse. That thought distressed me.

One thing at a time.

The Rectifier might not be present, but the Dancing Mistress nodded at me from near the fire. She knew me as well or better than anyone alive. I imagined that she could read my entire errand from the set of my shoulders, the cast of my mouth. I found I no longer cared. Stepping to the bar, I sat myself heavily in front of my host.

“I am short of funds tonight.” Nothing remained to me except my weapons, the clothes on my back-the outer robe itself stolen-and the child within. “But if you can see your way to a bit of credit, I could stand a good bowl of whatever curry is on the fire in the kitchen.”