Jay Lake - Green

I found that I did not care. Curry and I had played but one game: the game of life. He had lost. So have I.

Then I lit the white candle. “His debt to the Death Right is settled.” That did not seem to be the sort of kindness that should be said to send a man’s soul back onto the Wheel. I knew nothing of Michael Curry but his contempt for me. Like the nameless bandit whose life I had claimed, he must have had at least one grace. “Surely his mother loved him.”

I threw up once more, filled with the awful sense of having done something beyond retrieval. When that finally settled, I reclaimed the packet of my victim’s eyes. Then I stood and wiped my hands against the ruins of my robe. The drunk stirred. “Lost a friend of yours?” he mumbled.

“Yes,” I said. “Though I knew him only at the last.”

Heading back for the temple, I wondered what would be done with me.

Mother Vajpai took the crumpled mess of velvet. She eyed it with speculation, then looked me up and down. I stood before her in one of the belowground practice rooms. We were at little risk of being overheard or interrupted there.

“Did the Goddess guide your hand?” She chose her words with care.

I did not feel up to liturgical games. “She guided me in my progress, at least. I struck true. He did have a pistol.”

“Mmm.” She turned the ragged bundle over to inspect it from all sides. “I am sorry we did not know to warn you of that. What of the proof demanded?”

“You will find a blue eye and a green eye within that,” I said. “Also, I need to deliver a handful of copper paisas to a fireseller on Longspear Avenue.”

She waved that aside with a flip of her hand. “I’ll send a girl. You should not go back out for a while.” Then Mother Vajpai opened the damp, sticky bundle. She looked at the eyes crushed within, then began to laugh. “Green, my child, you have the makings of a Mother Justiciar.”

“I did as I was asked, Mother Vajpai.”

“Did you find the strongbox key?”

“Yes, Mother.”

“What became of it?”

My feet suddenly became very interesting to me. “The Goddess snatched the key from my hand as I escaped Crow Wing. She sent it to the bottom of the harbor. Alongside Michael Curry’s pistol.”

“And you?”

“I am here.”

“After being aboard a ship that could have carried you back to Copper Downs,” she whispered softly.

“I will never return to Copper Downs!” Tears welled, my chest hurt, my body ached, and I was covered in slime. “I go to the baths.”

“Go, Green, and take my blessing with you.”

I stormed from Mother Vajpai’s presence in search of some way to clean my hands. The stain on my soul would be much harder.

In the baths, I poured the water as hot as the boilers would make it, until my skin puffed shiny and pink. Blood still stained my hands, crusted under my fingernails. None of the body brushes would clean it off. I was crashing through the little mop closet in search of something stiffer when Samma came in.

“Green, Green!” she shouted, and tugged me away from my effort. When she saw my hands, she shrieked. “Come with me, now, please. Jappa said this might happen.”

I raised my hand to slap her away, then stopped myself. “What does Jappa have to do with this?”

“Sh-she said you might…” Samma sniffed, swallowing her next words. “Please, dearheart, just come with me.”

Glowering, I allowed myself to be led. I was wet and naked, and shivering despite the heat. The pain in my hands was the only thing that mattered. Maybe that would cleanse me.

Samma dragged me down a hall, shouting for help until Ello came. “Get Jappa, and have her meet us in the small practice room below,” she told the little girl. Her voice broke.

“Are we to f-fight?” I asked.

“No, no, sweetling.” Samma stopped pulling me to kiss my forehead a moment. “Something else. Completely else.”

Jappa somehow found the small practice room before we did. I stumbled in, shivering cold, to find a fire in a glowing brazier. We never had open flames in these rooms. They were underground, and any blaze that escaped was too far from water to fight easily.

“Over here, Green,” Jappa said, taking me from Samma. “We’ll make it all right.”

A sword frame stood in front of me, a heavy-legged tripod to support a wooden practice dummy. I saw the dummy was off its mounts. Jappa leaned me face forward against the frame and drew my hands above my head. The skin of them burned. Was that Curry’s blood?

“Are you going to slash me now?” I asked.

“No, darling,” she said. “I will give you the gift that Mother Chapurma gave me when we were both aspirants, and I came back from my first killing.”

She tied me to the frame with small leather straps. “What do you feel?” Jappa whispered in my ear.

I heard Samma whimpering Jappa’s name, then mine.

“Nothing,” I said. “Only blood on my hands.”

“You killed a man you didn’t know.”

Like Samma, I whimpered, then nodded.

“Now you are so cold, you burned yourself with water, just to feel something.”

“M-Mistress Tirelle,” I gasped.

“I am going to hurt you now.” Jappa’s voice was husky, low as it got when she was ready for her release after I had ridden her sweetpocket hard. “Only a little, but when you feel the pain, you will know that your other feelings will follow it back home to you.”

Closing my eyes, I whimpered again.

A crack echoed as I felt a lash across my naked back. I jumped against the frame, but truly it did not hurt even as much as a solid touch when we sparred in this very room. Samma shrieked once more.

Another crack, another touch of the lash-lower, across my buttocks. I jumped. She was right. The hot welt where the leather scored my skin reminded me of who I was.

A third blow, then Jappa leaned close. “Do you feel it?”

“Yes,” I gasped, then began to sob as she slowly flogged me. Blow after blow, driving me back from my cold place and into myself once more. Driving out the shade of Michael Curry. This was like the old beatings from Mistress Tirelle, except these were for me, to draw me in rather than push me away.

Somewhere in the middle, I felt the heat build in my sweetpocket. When Jappa set down her whip, I bucked, finding my own pleasure even as the splinters of the frame pushed into the front of my thighs, the crest of bone above my groin.

I had sworn I would never live under someone’s lash again. Now I swiftly came to love making a liar of myself.

Finally I lay shivering, my feet barely holding my weight against the pain of my binding. Jappa took me down. She and Samma drew some cloth around me and carried me weeping back to the dormitory. There Samma gave me suck against her breast while Jappa rubbed creams into my back and my poor burned hands, until I fell into the deepest, most dreamless sleep of my life.

The next morning, I was taken before Mother Vajpai, Mother Vishtha, and old Mother Meiko. They were in a room high up in the temple, where I had never before been. The space was more strangely shaped than most here, a teardrop with a floor across the bottom curve. The three sat in lotus on cushions. A single joss stick burned before them.

I was given a low stool with some quilted cotton folded across it.

“I… I might prefer to stand, Mothers,” I said when Mother Vajpai waved me to the seat. My buttocks still had welts. I was ashamed of everything I had done, or allowed to be done to me, the day before. That my hands were wrapped in oil-soaked cloth was the most direct evidence of my failings, but far from the only one.

“As it is to be pleasing you,” said Mother Meiko. “The chair is yours if you need it.”