Jay Lake - Green

I shook my head. “I suppose there is someone like him in Kalimpura, but I never passed within temples other than my own.” These priests are crazed, I thought. Like one who lusts for the pain of the lash so much, she hurts and kills to feel it.

“Gods are rarely pleasant. Even the smiling queens of the harvest have the blood of a murdered king somewhere beneath the soil of their fields.”

“We still possess a measure of grace.”

“That is why men are greater than gods.” Something in his voice caught at me. “We can know grace, and knowing grace, pass beyond. Even the gods themselves are not blessed with souls. When they die, it is forever.”

“Neither is the Dancing Mistress so blessed.” Though her people’s paths mingled far beyond their lives. That gave me a trace of hope.

“No. Which is why I have not been so worried.” He sighed. “She called you back from wherever you fled, did she not?”

Ah, to business. Finally. “To work against the bandit Choybalsan.”

“I believe I understand her intent, though the details of her plan have not been made known to me.”

“Whatever the plan was, it has failed.” I stood and stretched. My body ached abominably. “I see nothing here, know nothing.”

“That is because you are not looking at this problem through the correct lens.” Septio’s smile was small and tight. “The trouble belongs to the gods.”

“I broke the Duke with my words. The power came from the path of the Dancing Mistress’ people. Not human magic or the dreams of goddesses.”

“You misunderstand me. Choybalsan is not a bandit chieftain coming with a thousand spears at his back. He is a god rising from the stones of the inland hills. The villages and steadings lost? Most are not burned. They join him.”

“Why?”

“Because he is something other than this city. Copper Downs levies taxes, buys low, sells dear, and seduces away the children of the country for leagues about in all directions. What do the highland chiefs and headmen get for their trouble? Their life is like that of a flea which rides a dog. Choybalsan gives them power where they have had none since time out of memory.”

He leaned close. “That magic of the Duke’s. If you can channel it back, we can help the silent gods find their voices. Blackblood spawns avatars because the god himself is half aware. Likewise many of the other powers of this city. Those that have come to themselves scheme unseemly and poach on the rights and privileges of those who yet lie insensate.”

So we came to the crux. He wanted his god empowered so the death gods and the hunting gods and whoever else from the divine squabble didn’t make away piecemeal with Blackblood’s supply of fear and pain.

The gods were like children fighting over cake.

Was this what the Lily Goddess had feared? An infection of pettiness? More likely the rising godhead of Choybalsan. If new gods of soil and stone could rise here, they could rise anywhere. Would some peasant cult from the distant rice paddies and mango plantations take Kalimpura by storm?

No wonder so many people despised the tulpas. They were afraid.

I realized I’d missed part of what Septio was saying. “… the Pater Primus. I think you must do it this way.”

“I will have the Dancing Mistress back before I decide anything. Then I will speak with the Interim Council.” I wanted very much to be quit of this city, but that was not a choice I could make. Not yet, before I could tell the Lily Temple something worthwhile. Or sail west until I became a beggar at some distant dock, well away from the affairs of thrones and temples. I pushed the thought aside. “There has been little of the Duke’s magic here in Copper Downs, so we will go hunting Choybalsan. Under whose banner I do not care, for my sword will be my own.”

That was a lie of sorts. Though I was on an errand for a goddess myself, I knew which banner I preferred. Kalimpura, wicked as it could be, lived in peace beneath the rule of dozens of smaller powers. The temples there were only a part of the balance. What Septio argued here was for placing the temples at the heart of the matter. More to the point, his temple.

I could not see how elevating the priests of a pain god to the seats of power was to anyone’s good.

“Come,” he said.

I let Septio take my hand and lead me toward the strange mirror. Once more, where I might have expected god magic, it was only a door-albeit a peculiar one. Beyond was a wooden staircase that folded around a shaft. The distant banging of gongs echoed.

Septio smiled at me in the dim light. I could see his teeth gleam. “We are timely.”

Blackblood’s sanctuary was nothing of what I might have expected from a pain god. Of a familiar formal design, it could have been any official building in Copper Downs. Pillars of black marble supported a vaulted ceiling on which the stars of some night sky foreign to the Stone Coast had been set in gleaming silver. Dark, narrow banners hung down in shadowed strips, much as they had in the palace. Low galleries behind each rank of pillars left and right hosted a series of stone couches, which might have been funerary platforms in a death house. Narrow curtained windows within the side galleries let in some light- when had it become morning outside? I wondered in a brief burst of worried fear-while gas lamps attached to the pillars hissed with the brightest fire. A pool between the pillars quivered like mud but showed a strange, malleable silver. The sanctuary smelled not of grave dust or funeral herbs, but mostly of the vinegar someone had recently used to clean the floors.

Neither altar nor throne stood at the far end, just a cluster of men in dark robes with cowls drawn up around their faces. Bareheaded young aspirants-in a brief moment of distraction, I wondered if they were so called here-circled the priests, banging gongs, shaking bells, and casting powders into the air.

More mummery, of the sort that irked me so. I checked the seating of my veil and trailed Septio toward his fellow priests.

One looked up at our approach. He lifted a hand. The leaping racket of the aspirants halted between one breath and the next, except for the faint ringing of the settling gongs. The other priests turned to stare.

They all wore masks woven from thin strips of leather, which covered their faces in ridges running from side to side. Again, mummery, but I had to admire the theater guising. At any distance, the robes would seem empty of all but shadows.

We worshipped the Lily Goddess bareheaded and barefaced, but perhaps these men felt a need to hide from their god. I knew I would if Blackblood had been my patron.

Septio stepped into their circle. He made a bow, which courtesy was returned by a series of nods from the masked priests. I tilted my own chin, which courtesy was returned not at all.

A lesser silver pool was set into the floor at their feet. This one shivered as the great one in the center of the hall had-except where it had been a strangely liquid silver showing nothing, an image was visible in this pool.

The god magic I had been expecting. I looked.

Skinless stood on cobbled stone before a whirling cloud of white dust. The Dancing Mistress lay curled on the ground beside it. I realized when I looked at her that the stones were flags, not cobbles. Skinless was very large.

The avatar seemed hesitant as well. Frightened, even.

I looked more closely at the dust. Or sand, perhaps, for it seemed I could spy coarseness. “What is it?” I asked quietly. “Salt?”

Septio made a small noise in his throat. “Yes.”

“Why would the avatar of a pain god fear pain? Especially when his own priests embrace it?”

“Pain is still pain.” Septio looked around at his fellow priests, then said something I did not follow. Their temple language, I assumed.