Kalimpura (Green Universe) (12 page)

“The blade was heated, then quenched in the blood of a god,” I replied. “As was its mate, which I unfortunately left behind in the Red House.”

“You left something like
this
behind?” Her tone was somewhere between appalled and astonished.

“At the time I was somewhat distracted,” I answered snappishly. “And besides, I did not realize just then what I held in hand.” Though by then I probably should have.

Mother Argai had declined to further vandalize the cabin in the name of proof, but instead was studying the blade carefully.

“Which god, if I may ask?” Mother Vajpai now looked very thoughtful. “Not your ox god, surely.”

“Blackblood, who was giving me some trouble at the time.” Now I wondered at his motives, and especially so in sending Skinless after me there at the end. Seeing me off? Or watching to make sure I left?

Was there a difference?

Mother Vajpai sighed. “Only you would stab a god who was giving you ‘trouble.’”

“Only Green would think to try to stab a god at all,” Mother Argai added.

“It was never so simple as—” I broke off. Small point in defending myself. Especially since they were essentially correct.

“At any rate,” said Mother Vajpai, switching back to Petraean, “I implore you not to test this blade against anything important, such as the steam kettle or the plates of the hull.”

She threw the knife back at me as both Ponce and Ilona winced. I snatched it out of the air, letting the hilt slap firmly into my hand and trying not to wonder what this oh-so-strange blade would have done to me if I somehow had caught the weapon on the wrong part of the spin.

“Show-off,” muttered Ponce. Despite the better weather, he was looking as miserable as Ilona had the day before.

I still could not say if the blade was a blessing or a curse. None of my companions had any advice to offer, not even Mother Vajpai, from whom I’d hoped to find some wisdom.

*   *   *

Aboard ship, I began composing a letter to Chowdry. Or a series of letters. I wasn’t sure which. Perhaps it did not matter. In many of the most important ways, my fellow Lily Blades knew me far better than he or almost anyone else. On the other hand, Chowdry was the only person who knew me well and also had a foot planted firmly on each side of the Storm Sea.

His experience and mine shared curious echoes that went beyond any obvious connection.

Besides which, writing to Chowdry was in a sense writing to Endurance. I wasn’t sure any of the gods could read, for all that so many of them were fond of dictating scripture, but surely if any god could not do so, it would be the ox god. In Seliu, I wrote,

Weather continues rough here. Most everyone but me is miserable. So far they have not all needed to throw up at the same time. This is a great help with the children.

I am of the opinion that our vessel the “Prince Enero” is being pursued. If you have occasion to do so, I would take it as a great favor if you could direct someone to inquire of the Harbormaster’s office which vessels weighed anchor the same afternoon of our own departure. As a practical matter, it will be weeks before this letter can reach you, and the reply just as long, but it would ease my mind to know.

I commend Ponce back to you. He is devoted to the children, and perhaps too devoted to me, but this will pass. I am a fit woman for no man at all, as you know of my history. At some point I may have to speak sharply to him.

He has also made a shrine to Endurance in his cabin. I do not know if the little ox statue carved of horn is a votive item of your devising or something he had found in the Dockmarket, but it seems to focus him well. I may yet pray before it myself, just to be sure, though I do not suppose the god will hear me so far from his home.

Do not stint the stone temple, and I hope your compound knows more peace in my absence than it ever did in my presence. Should you require aid of the sort represented by the Lily Blades, call at the Bustle Street Lazaret and ask for Salissa; or failing her presence, Laris. I do not believe Mother Iron and Endurance have much cause for jealousy between them, and each of your followings might profit from common cause with the other.

I wished I’d thought of that last
before
I’d departed. It might have been good advice to give out in my final days in Copper Downs, had I been able to fit such a conversation in between my busy schedule of murder, arson, and funerary rites. Once again, I wondered how ordinary people lived their lives, when no one was lurking about with an intent to kill them.

Later, I went back on deck to see that the sky and sea had calmed with the coming of night. We were far from any shore, so that every horizon but the north was that slightly wavering line the ocean makes for itself in the absence of rougher play. North was obscured by retreating clouds that threw lightning about, the last of the storm we’d been weathering almost since setting out.

Had I truly left the storms behind?

*   *   *

The next three mornings I learned that the answer to that question was emphatically no.
Prince Enero
ran against seas as high and rough as the first day’s, maybe more so. Our fourth day at sea, I stared out the port awhile at the spray, with occasional breaks to see racing walls of water ranging again in color from cinnamon to violet.

It was as if the entire ocean had been made into some great stew.

The children were wailing, strapped into a pair of sleeping boxes because it was too dangerous to have them out. No amount of soothing had helped, so finally we’d just let them scream in hopes they’d tire themselves into sleep.

Ilona, bent over a bucket again, groaned.

“This is not natural!” I finally said, shouting over the wailing of my miserable babies. Ponce had been insisting on that point for the last two days, until he’d eventually locked himself in his own cabin, crying with fear.

“No,” she gasped. “It is not. You’ve made this crossing three times?”

“Never like this.” Ponce had been right. I wished I’d used kinder words with him.

Timing my movements with the roll of the deck so I could brace myself as it lifted and fell, I shrugged out of the woolen robe I’d been wearing and began to don my fighting leathers. My left arm was still a bruised mess, though the numbness and the pain had both given way to an unceasing tingling that was almost worse. Like hearing someone whistle tunelessly, without end, until you wanted to break their jaw and sew their lips together.

Ilona would be no help, however.

“Who are you going to fight?” She took several deep, whooping breaths and wiped a string of bile from her mouth as the cabin shifted from a steep angle to the port all the way to an equally steep starboard angle. An assortment of shoes, rattles, and other small objects flowed back and forth across the deck in a cacophony.

“The weather.”

Not even my new, god-blooded blade could cut into the heart of a storm, though I did wonder what would happen if I tried to slash, say, the wind. Could I split a raindrop?

It mattered little in the moment. I wanted to speak to the captain, whose acquaintance I had not yet made. Even the mate I’d met had not given me his name.

“Watch over them,” I told Ilona.

“Uhnnn…” was all the reply I received. It would have to do.

*   *   *

The inner passageway led to a compartment forward that in kinder seas served as the passengers’ mess. Supposedly the captain kept a table there, but we had yet to see a formal meal service.

Wooden rails were bolted to the walls for exactly such times as this. I staggered with my right hand always braced, keeping my injured left arm close and protected, until I’d worked my way down the passage and through the forward compartment. A breezeway beyond included laddered steps leading up to the bridge.

Unfortunately, the breezeway was intermittently being filled with tons of seawater. When the ocean wasn’t leaking in through the hatch and window frames, the wind was doing its best to make up the lack by forcing the rain against everything.

Again, I would have to time my progress to the swells and the ship’s corresponding rolls. To have the hatch to the breezeway undogged when one of those waves broke over the deck would court disaster. At the least, I would leave a terrible mess behind me.

So I took my time and counted off how long between the floods. Even the weather has patterns. It is truly not so different from fighting an opponent who overmatches your strength and reach. You watch for her patterns of movement, and shift your own into the little valleys of opportunity that open between the peaks of her effort.

Likewise with the storm. My most significant impediment was my damaged left arm. I could not use both hands to quickly undog the hatch, exit, and clamp it shut once more.

I practiced instead. As soon as the next surge broke and began to drain away in a rush of dripping white foam, I undogged the hatch. Counting off the time I took to do so, I simply secured it once again without turning the bar and opening it.

About fifteen seconds by my reckoning.

We were seeing the big waves every minute and a half or so. Fifteen seconds to undog, perhaps fifteen more to move the lever one-handed. Open the door, step out. Another ten seconds. Close the door. Close the outside lever one-handed. Fifteen seconds. Dog the hatch from the other side. Another fifteen seconds. I was over a minute already before I could begin to scramble up the ladderway to the bridge, and that assumed I made no mistakes, or did not slip.

Why am I doing this?

Self-doubt in the moment of action was such a rare thing for me that I surprised myself in asking the question. I already knew the answer, of course. This storm was unnatural. God-raised or cursed or some such. I was the only person aboard who might even hope to call on any countervailing force. And we could not simply sail into this for weeks. Even the mighty kettle ship
Prince Enero
would founder.

The next wall of water broke outside. I began undogging the hatch while the wave still pounded on the wood, metal, and glass of the compartment’s forward bulkhead. One of our own Stone Coast ships would already have broken beneath this assault, I realized.

I opened the hatch and stepped out. Foaming salt water was ankle-deep in the breezeway, and the wind shrieked like a demon out of the nether hells. I turned and one-handed pulled the hatch to.
Drop the lever, flip the dogs one by one. Move, move, move, don’t bother to count, because the storm will do it for you.

The deck rolled beneath me and I glanced up to see another wave rising. It was like staring at a wall. I wasted precious seconds watching the sea raise that giant hand against me, then began scrambling up the bridge ladder as the next great inrush of the ocean broke against
Prince Enero
’s port railing.

The raging water caught at my calves, my thighs, my waist. I kept climbing, praying to stay ahead of it. I felt as if I would be sucked down at any moment. Lost over the side without a trace. It boiled around me, stinging cold and angry as any jilted lover.

A jilted lover whose fists weighed as much as cities.

The water reluctantly pulled away without claiming me in its grip. Gasping, I climbed more, realizing from the agony in my left arm that I’d been clinging with both hands.

Oh, in that moment I would have given much to kill Councilor Lampet all over again.

I gained the landing at the top and pounded on the bridge hatch. A face loomed in the little glass port on the hatch—my friend the mate. He looked amazed.

A moment later it opened, and I was yanked within.

The bridge was warm, of a miracle. A little heater with white stones glowing red behind a grid kept them all from expiring of the damp. The air steamed. Three men stared at me in frank astonishment, the fourth gripping the wheel and studying the water ahead as if his life depended on it.

As if all our lives depended on it.

The mate exploded first, shouting in a language I did not understand until he registered my lack of comprehension. He switched to his accented Petraean. “
What
are you doing? They told me you were a madwoman, but I thought it was jealousy!”

That statement I marked down to explore later, because I very much wanted to know which
they
had told him that. “The storm! I have come about the storm.” I was forced to shout back simply to be heard above the din of rain and wind and wave.

The man at the wheel glanced at me once, then turned his attention forward again, barking questions in that same language I did not understand. He and the mate argued briefly, before the mate turned to me once more. “I have explained to the captain that you are a madwoman let loose by your people as a sacrifice to calm the storm.”

“Not that, you idiot. This is no natural weather, is it?”

By way of an answer, lightning danced across the bow of the ship, visible from the bridge’s windows. Balls of it stayed there to spin and shoot sparks in half a dozen colors.

The mate looked forward, then back at me. His face was mottled by the swirling colors. “No,” he finally said. “It would seem not.” With that, he spat a curse in this crew’s language that I did not speak. Some Sunward tongue that it might profit me to learn if we survived this, I thought.

“I am a kind of priestess.” There was no way for me to speak at less than a shout and hope to be heard. “With the ear of several among the divine. Tell me what you can of this.”

He shook his head. “We do not know. The weather should not be out of the south so much right now, and these seas seemed to be aimed at our ship. As if the ocean were fighting with purpose.”

The captain barked another question without taking his eyes off the water.

I looked at them all. “Is there a walkway in front of the bridge?”

The mate nodded, his face uneasy.

“The seas are not breaking this high,” I pointed out as reasonably as I could with such loudness. “I will manage myself out there.”

He pointed to another hatch to the captain’s right. I crabbed across the deck, sidling past the captain and the other two officers. There was small point in smiling at them. I’d be a hero or I’d be dead very soon. In either case, what happened in here would not matter so much.