Jay Lake - Green

“I do not traffic in weapons,” she said seriously, “but if you would like the use of my gray-handled boning knife, I will not object.”

The kitchen tools hung near the fire from a wooden slat. I knew exactly which steel she spoke of. This blade was far smaller and lighter than the last two I’d carried, which had both been fighting weapons. Taking it down, I hefted the knife with an enemy in mind. I could fight well enough bare-handed, but others would not recognize the threat.

Is that why Skinless was immune to weapons but not to blows? Because no one here ever strengthens their hands hard enough to matter?

That question I put away for later consideration. The knife I put away for later use. The handle stuck out of my boot top and made me look the rogue, but the time for subtlety was past. Especially veiled and dressed in black.

Neckbreaker had seemed a good idea in Kalimpura. I was coming to understand how childish he was. Even so, he was a safer person to be than the girl Green.

I took up my veil and marveled at how well I could move, even with the raw seaming of scars about my body. I turned to my benefactress and her daughter. “There is much I owe you, but right now, my best thanks is my absence. I will head downhill and south, and forget that I ever knew this place.”

Corinthia Anastasia darted toward me and hugged my waist hard. “Don’t be stupid,” she said earnestly.

Her mother smiled sadly. “Listen to my child.”

With my knife and my little wooden bell, I walked out into the sunlit orchard and away from them. The city awaited me. Choybalsan, too, and the Lily Goddess in Her distant temple. For all my dallying with gods, it seemed strange that my greatest blessing had come from a lone woman and her child.

Though the tombs could not have been much more than a day’s ride up the Barley Road from Copper Downs, it took me three days of walking to cover the distance. I traveled in the hills to the west, though they lessened with each furlong south. There were goat tracks aplenty, and odd mossy walls to shelter beside from time to time. Those could have been the remains of castles or cottages. I did not know, and did not care.

As I made my slow progress, I watched the road. Despite what I’d been told, it was largely empty. I did not know what the usual traffic here might be. Now there was only the occasional rider, always racing. They went both one way and the other.

Choybalsan’s army might be called bandits, but truly they were farm boys and woodsmen dressed like rogues. There had never been enough people or trade in this empty country to support raiders. That meant they would campaign like farmers and woodcutters. Slowly and without precision.

I would have expected scouts, in any case. Whatever was he doing? My escape was more than a week old now. Unless they’d gone hunting the Dancing Mistress, they must fall upon the city soon. There would not be enough to eat up there, and frost was not far away in the higher hills.

Being ahead of them pleased me well enough.

Then I crossed a wooded shoulder of a hill and heard the noise of surf ahead.

Climbing away from the road, I found a good spreading oak. I scrambled up that tree to look south.

Copper Downs lay before me. The sea glinted beyond, showing an endless southern horizon. Choybalsan’s army was drawn up in the open lands outside the city where the first few wayhouses and stables and shanties had been overwhelmed by several thousand men and horses. The lightning fence was not crackling just now, but surely this force had not come without their god-king before them in glorious array.

I had not arrived in advance of them. I had rested too long amid the orchards of the dead.

Brushing that aside as unworthy, I studied the army awhile. I looked as Mistress Tirelle had taught me. And saw with eyes of history, eyes sharpened by maps and mathematics. I was never an expert on the disposition and application of massed forces, but I knew more than a little of logistics. The Pomegranate Court had trained me in part to be a chatelaine. That is a job not much different from quartermaster, except for the uniform.

Here are the things I could determine:

They had been before the city at least three days. I was beyond crediting that an entire army had marched past me in the night unnoticed.

They had not come in a sweeping mass, or the roadway I’d been following would have been badly used in a manner I could have spotted even from a distance.

They had not fought since before arriving. The outlying buildings and small villages overrun by Choybalsan’s bandits were still intact. No burning, no wrack. So no one had stood against them. Not in a body, at any rate.

That meant that some in and around the city had welcomed the army. Neither did anyone within sally out. The profusion of guards were largely patrolmen and gatekeepers, not trained to stand against massed force.

What was this army waiting for?

Perhaps Choybalsan was not here. In which case, I might not be too late.

Why would you conquer your own city?

That was when I knew where the bandit-king had gone. And why there was no lightning. Somewhere in the city, probably in the upper rooms of the Textile Bourse, Federo was offering the Interim Council the desperate bargain he would report having made with the perfidious Choybalsan.

He didn’t need to conquer the city. He just needed to arrange a surrender to himself.

I sat amid some bayberry bushes and laughed quietly. Federo’s arrogance had a surpassing cleverness that my soul was just dark enough to admire. At the same time, I wondered how it was he could put godhood on and off like a cloak. It seemed a most useful trick.

Had all the gods started that way? Was the Splintering nothing more than a metaphor for the way that the measures of grace and evil within any man could grow at the right touch?

Septio had said everything moved in a cycle.

Which in turn made me wonder who the Lily Goddess had once been.

My path led to the coast. I met the Quarry Highway with its small river alongside. A log tangle gave me a ford over the water. Sheer nerve took me across the broken pavers of the road. Close to the sea, I had to cross the East Road, but there I was able to crawl underneath the trackway following a flood channel meant to drain the north verge.

Here the stones of the city gave way to shale and gravel beaches. The littoral east of the city was too shallow for a harbor. Choybalsan’s horsemen rode their circuit all the way to salt water. Some of the men, and most of the horses, seemed afraid of the sea, though a few riders raced whooping in the foamy edge of the water.

Clouds had rolled in to steal the warmth of the sunlight and replace it with a chilled gloom. I skulked among the low ridges with their sparse vegetation, cursing that I would have to go all the way back to the Greenbriar River and across before I found a decently unpatrolled way in. As I grumbled about my fruitless effort, I nearly fell into a muddy creek that had been invisible from farther inland.

That was odd. I should have seen it bridged at the East Road. I followed the water’s lazy course alongside one of the graveled banks, staying low so I wouldn’t be spotted by a horseman atop one of the ridges. The bank crooked west, as did the stream, until I found a stinking little pond choked with water lilies.

It trapped enough water to keep a busy stream flowing, but this pond had no inflow. I stared at the lilies awhile. They would grow in bad water. Some people said the plants even cleaned water, made it fresh again.

More to the point, the Goddess had sent me a dream of water lilies, when the Dancing Mistress and I had been imprisoned together beneath Her temple.

First I tied the wooden bell, muffled with some vines, to my waist. I did not want to lose it. While a good soaking was not ideal, water would not ruin it immediately. Then I hefted the boning knife and waded in. The pond had a muddy graveled floor, tangled with roots. My feet found broken junk and stones even through my boots. My nose found the refuse of a city. This was a drain for the water and blood of Copper Downs.