Jay Lake - Green

Temples and priories and more anonymous buildings stood on each flank of the road. I realized this quarter was a small city in its own right. We’d walked past it on all four sides, without ever quite coming this close to it before. The Temple Quarter extended for blocks and blocks. From here, it seemed to have an endless depth.

“The Street of Horizons,” the Dancing Mistress said. “So called, I’m told, because it runs forever.”

“Or at least eleven blocks,” I said, working the city-math out as we spoke.

“Yes, but can you see where it exits the quarter?”

I could not. Which really was the point. “Some old glamer?”

“That, or a very clever bit of architecture.”

That was easy to answer. “If we walk this road running almost due east, we should exit the quarter once more.”

“Of course. The architecture is not that clever.”

I headed down the Street of Horizons. The Dancing Mistress followed close behind. She was letting me find my own way. If I could have smelled magic, I knew it would be reeking here like a building after a fire. Whatever the Lily Goddess had feared might be visible in some fashion. Surely the gods knew one another’s spoor, even across the ocean. Their sight ran farther than that of men, whatever one thought of their wisdom.

That borderline blasphemy in mind, I found the temples crowded together like people in a market. In a Copper Downs market, I corrected myself. If they’d been crowded in the Kalimpuri fashion, they would have built literally one on top of the other. There were few common walls. Divine power apparently needed empty air to serve for insulation here in the chilly north.

Where most of the districts of Copper Downs had a style-reflecting either function, as in the warehouses down by the docks, or form, as in the counting houses along Redwallet Street and elsewhere in the financial areas-the temples enjoyed no unifying architecture. Each reflected the needs or nature of their gods. Gods being what they were, that meant the needs and nature of their worshippers.

The Street of Horizons was no longer abandoned, but it was still very quiet. Small groups of people shuffled to and from the demands of their religions. A man with a donkey cart wandered slowly in pursuit of what little trash was strewn on this road. Three young men with shaven heads led a protesting pig on a long leather leash to some sacrifice.

Little enough happened here. I wondered when these temples saw the bulk of their foot traffic. Dawn services? Was there a Petraean holy day? My readings under Mistress Danae had told stories of every possible combination of sacrament and dedication.

“How many people here worship regularly?” I asked.

“The priests complain of this often,” she told me. “There will need to be a generation born without fear of this place before they see the crowds this street was built to host. People sidle in and out as they find the need, but in Copper Downs, the impulse to divinity is still a very private matter.”

“As it is for your people,” I said.

“We do not worship,” the Dancing Mistress said.

“I know. You follow a path.”

“Yes.” She sounded somewhat miffed, as if I’d stolen a secret. “Worship requires a soul to hunger for the divine.”

I doubted the distinction was so clear and simple, but I would not challenge her. Instead I kept walking, and wondered where the gods were. They did not come out to see me, whatever business they might have been about since their awakening.

If anyone in Copper Downs had recognized the taint of the Duke upon me, I might have thought it one of the gods. While I could not smell magic, they surely could.

Not this day, however.

We found the other end of the eleven blocks without incident. I felt no tickle nor tremble. Nothing. No gods, no ghosts, no in-between northern tulpas.

I was strangely disappointed. Whatever the Lily Goddess had hearkened to, it wasn’t here. Of course, the coils of the Dancing Mistress’ heart didn’t twine through this most human of quarters in Copper Downs. Foreigners and nonhumans were to be found all over this city, but not in the Temple Quarter.

“Nothing,” the Dancing Mistress said in that way she had of continuing conversations we had not actually been having.

“I might as well have been touring the bourses and looking at the corn bids.”

“We did that yesterday,” she said.

At that I had to laugh. Yet the lack of any response here meant we would next seek underground. My ghostly trail of victims would far more easily find me in the darkness below than they would in the busy daylight up here.

“Before we go Below,” I told her, “I would like to make death offerings to the women of the Factor’s court.”

“That is not worship,” she observed.

“I know. I do not mean it to be. I have laid my ghosts that way since you and Federo first showed me the rite of the two candles.” Or tried to lay them, I thought.

We went looking for a wax chandler. The gods had said little enough to me. Perhaps my ghosts would say more. I wanted myself calm before I had to face them.

Half an hour later, the Dancing Mistress and I knelt together in a little grove of bay laurels in a plot of land near an old minehead incongruously located in the Velviere District. I carried lucifer matches with me, but was still quite glad that the sun was out. Autumn was at hand, but this was one of the pleasant days with which the Stone Coast could be blessed at the passing of summer.

I set out twelve black candles and twelve white. The Dancing Mistress had made no further comment at the purchase. I could not be sure how many women and girls had died in the Factor’s house. Probably no one knew to tell me. This number felt right.

One by one I lit them. They burned fitfully in the little breeze, but the trees gave us sufficient shelter to keep them alight. The candles gleamed and spat. I did not have a speaking in mind, but words came to me unbidden.

“We all bent to the whims of a master we could not withstand,” I said. “I meant to set myself free, thinking that would free us all.” I passed my hands over the black and the white. The candles warmed my palms. “I am sorry for what became of you, each and every one.”

The air swirled close. For a moment I thought the Lily Goddess was upon me, but it was just the wind rising and snatching away the flames. Then I realized I was done.

“When will we go before the Interim Council?” I asked her.

“Soon. Word will come, perhaps as early as tomorrow.”

“I would take a good meal and rest my feet. We can go Below this afternoon or this evening, as you see best.”

“Come,” she said. “I know where to find stewed rabbits with corn and peppers.”

I followed her to a meal I was more than pleased to eat.

At dusk we clambered the high wall that blocked the minehead and its tailings from the view of the wealthy who populated the Velviere District. Within the brambled, jumbled space we located the shaft entrance and descended Below by a long creaking ladder.

Once down, we didn’t run as in the old days. We walked carefully with weapons loose in hand, coldfire pressed tight between our fingers. I understood this-we would not draw attention. It seemed a false economy. People saw best with their eyes. Most of what lived Below saw with noses and ears and stranger senses.

The Dancing Mistress did not lead with purpose, either. She murmured occasional warnings, guiding me onward.

I let my senses explore the dark. It was noisy here, in a way I had not remembered from the Below of my earlier days. Kalimpura was loud beneath the stones, but that was more a matter of Below there being a sewer system and thus well supplied with inlets serving to conduct sound. Given our climb down that ladder, we were a good fifty feet beneath the streets. Far beneath the sewers and into the mine galleries.