Kalimpura (Green Universe) (33 page)

“Discouraging,” added Mother Argai. She seemed fascinated by Firesetter, in a way I had never seen her respond to a man.

“Um, yes,” I added. “Shall we go?”

We walked along the shadowed gutter, avoiding the center of the road. The basement proved almost three blocks away, down a flight of narrow, rubbish-strewn stairs to which I would never have given a second look. Beyond was a low-ceiling taproom that Firesetter very nearly had to waddle through to reach a huge chair at the back. Just as I’d expected, except I’d been looking in the wrong part of Kalimpura. He tugged a table in front of his seat, while we collected three more ordinary chairs.

I was not so keen to sit with my back to the door, but I wanted to face him.

Cheap, sour beer was forthcoming in shallow bowls at a copper paisa for every two. People came to this place to get drunk, I realized, not to sit and drink. The four or five others in the room paid us no more mind than they paid the rotten rushes on the floor.

“So you are here,” I said carefully once our bowls were settled and the old woman was back to her laconic busyness behind the rough-hewn bar.

Firesetter rumbled something into his bowl—it was, like the chair, bigger than ours. “We have been for months,” Fantail answered. “Living quietly among the Poppet Dancers.”

“It is a brilliant disguise,” I admitted. “When I finally sorted out what you had done, I was amazed. We spent much time around the Evenfire Gate trying to pick up your trail.”

“Hmm,” said Mother Argai, still transfixed by Firesetter.
What
had gotten into her?

“Did not like that place.” The Red Man’s voice echoed like rocks on more rocks.

Fantail brushed a hand against his arm. “We were safe enough.” The lilt in her Seliu was far stranger even than Firesetter’s accent. “But it was difficult to go in and out. The longer you live among the Sindu, the more they come to expect you to understand and follow their rules.”

This time his voice was an earthquake rumble. “Enough rules.”

“Indeed.” I couldn’t see yet how to introduce what I most desperately wanted to ask. These two were so clearly in hard luck, and so clearly tired of whatever they’d been running from. Or toward.

“Mummers are not so bad,” he added. “They do not mind what I am. And no one has tried to rob the warehouse since I tore the head off that obnoxious little man.”

Definitely a northern accent in his Seliu, though now that I was hearing him speak at greater length, I was not so sure if Firesetter had learned the language among Petraeans or farther east along the north margin of the Storm Sea.

“We all abide where the world brings us.” I cursed myself for uttering such foolishly pious words. “I must ask, though, how did you know me?”

His rejoinder was quick and to the point. “How did you know me?”

“No one looks like you.”

A great red hand reached across the width of the table to brush my scarred cheek with an astonishing gentleness. “No one looks like you, either, Green.”

“Probably not,” I admitted. “But how did you know of me at all?”

“People speak of you. We were fresh to Kalimpura when the Prince set sail for the north. We heard that the Bittern Court hunted you all the way across the Storm Sea.”

“That alone makes you something of a hero in certain places of this city,” Fantail added. “If you were to be declaring yourself, many would stand behind you.”

“Declare myself for what?” I asked with disgust. “Copper Downs gave me my fill of civic politics. Enough for the rest of my life, I am quite certain of it.”

Firesetter waved my words away. “The rich grow wealthier while the poor starve a little more each year.”

Mother Argai finally spoke, though there was something brittle in her voice. “When I was a girl, the Guilds and Courts still hired many. They have become more about money and less about the people of Kalimpura.”

“And the Bittern Court is central to all of this, of course,” I said.

“Bittern Court, yes.” She sipped her bowl, as if to cover some confusion, before saying in a swift rush, “I was born in Attarapa.”

I had no idea what that blurted statement meant, as I had never heard of Attarapa. I had also never heard Mother Argai speak of her past. Firesetter stared at her briefly with a bland expression. A tiny smile crossed Fantail’s face, so fleeting I was not certain I had seen it.

Disappointment flooded Mother Argai’s expression for a longer moment, before being replaced by resolution. “In the Stickleridge Mountains, just north of the Fire Lakes,” she added.

Firesetter’s face transformed from bland to predatory in the space of a breath. “You know,” he said, followed by a burst of words in a language I did not recognize.

Mother Argai answered with a few fumbling, halting words of her own in that language before switching back to Seliu. “No,” she continued. “You were gods to us.”

“Did you ever meet any of my people?” The pain in his voice was strange to hear. Like watching a shark beg.

“Distant gods,” Mother Argai amended herself. “Vanished.” She stared down into her beer.

In the silence that followed, I realized I couldn’t speak to whatever was between them. History, future, fascination; it was not a problem for today. Instead, I brought the conversation back to the present. “What do you want? Surely not to be lying low in a warehouse for the rest of your days.”

“We have been looking,” Fantail answered. “And waiting.”

“For what?…”

“My people.” Firesetter shivered, then gripped the edge of the table so hard, it splintered. The wood around his fingers smoldered.

Fantail brushed her hand lightly down his arm and murmured a few words I could not distinguish.

He nodded, chin tucked low, and hunched in on himself.

“Great spells have been set around him,” she explained. “From the time he was whelped. Some questions cannot be asked without the risk of provoking him to great violence at their very words.” At my expression, Fantail hastily added, “Against his will.”

“The Saffron Tower did this to him?” I asked, my voice tight.

“Yes.” By her tone, she seemed unsurprised that I knew of them.

“They sent you to Copper Downs.”

A nod from Fantail. Firesetter still studied the wood grain of the table as if his life depended on it. Or possibly our lives.

“After you left, they sent another pair.”

“Ah.” Her eyes left mine briefly, then returned. “Who?”

“Twins. A pair of older Hanchu men named Iso and Osi. I was much deceived by them at first.”

“We know them.” Her voice was so tight, I could have cut with it. “What … what became of these twins?”

“They slew the goddess Marya.” At my words, Fantail winced but did not speak up. I continued, memories flooding me. “They very nearly did for another god, but were brought down. They did not rise again with their lives in their hands.”

She gasped. “You
slew
them?”

That brought me back into the moment. “Me, personally? No. But yes, I was responsible for their ending.” If you could call it that, praying down the women who’d followed Desire’s daughters, and having them touch those two strange old men to death.

Fantail touched Firesetter’s arm again. He, too, was gone from this place and moment. She seemed to be calling him back.

Finally he stopped shivering and looked up. The glow in his eyes had died. The wood where his fingers rested was no longer smoldering.

“She slew the twins,” the apsara told her Red Man.

“They were…” Words rumbled unspoken in his mouth. Then: “Difficult.”

I had a sense that this man had known difficult much as I had known difficult. “We need your help,” I said, an appeal from one lost child to another.

Firesetter shook his head. Fantail glanced from him to me and back. Something between desperation and hope gleamed in her eyes. Mother Argai tracked this, staring intently at the apsara.

“What do you wait here for if not change?” I was speaking to her now, more than to him.

“We spent three years in the Fire Lakes,” she said quietly. “A hotter, drier, scantier hell you could not imagine even if you were a god and the land awaited molding. We never found a sign of his people.”

“Legends,” breathed Mother Argai. “As a girl, I was taught that his kind had passed on into time’s embrace.”

“Legends walk every day,” I pointed out. “A legend is just a story made bold by time and distance.” Uncomfortably, I was reminded of what Ilona had said about the tales
Prince Enero
would carry away from here regarding that business in the harbor. That
first
round of business in the harbor.

“We know.” Her face closed. “We hunted goddesses for the Saffron Tower for almost three decades.”

Hunting deities was about like hunting legends, I should have thought. I wondered how many Maryas had been struck down by them. “In my childhood, I was trained to kill a certain person. Or at least a certain kind of person.” I did not speak of this often, and my own words surprised me. “The two of you must have been fostered with similar purpose.”

She nodded. Firesetter’s stare settled on me with the smoldering power of a forge’s flame.

I continued. “I would also imagine a similar discipline. And cruelty.”

“There are things I cannot even say, or think, about myself.” Desperation rumbled in his voice. He began to shake as he went on. “They told me I was a made thing, that there was only a single one of me anywhere on the plate of the world. When I found out differently, in Copper Downs, we came here looking for my k-kind. I hoped they could loosen these invisible chains.”

“Indivisible chains,” Fantail added.

Firesetter’s hands had begun to smolder again.

“Your people have passed into myth.” I looked at Mother Argai again. She still seemed awestruck, or perhaps lovestruck. I could not tell.
That
disturbed me, coming from this capable, sanguine woman. “But you have not.”

“Can you find them?” Fantail asked, pleading.

“I do not know.” It was my turn to study my hands as the odor of scorched wood rose around us. “Any promises I make now are empty. I hold no power but that of my arms and mind. The Fire Lakes are unknown to me, and so I can bring no understanding to this.”

Meeting their gazes once more, I continued. “But once I prevail in my current business, I can turn my attention to persuading the Temple of the Silver Lily to putting its resources toward helping you. Over three hundred capable women, access to libraries and funds, and a goddess who can be an oracle.” I shot Mother Argai another look. “And at least one of us who does know the Fire Lakes.”

She nodded with a smile that bordered on the idiotic.

“But I need something in return,” I added.

“Every bargain must have its coin.” Fantail brushed her fingers down Firesetter’s arm again. Calming him? Or herself. He seemed to be finding his control once more. I wondered why I had not been frightened at such an obvious and powerful anger on his part.

No, I realized, not anger. That was why I was not frightened. He was not angry at me, or perhaps at anyone at all. Firesetter was in the grips of some cruel spell or curse or prayerful binding that kept him from his own essence.

He might be dangerous—almost certainly was—but he was not ill-intended.

“My coin is this,” I explained, my words coming fresh on the heels of that new insight. “I need your help in fighting the Saffron Tower.” As she opened her mouth, I held up my hand. “Not directly. We do not face them in some battle in this place. But their schemes reach here. It is my hope to learn from you of their methods and purposes, that I might turn that against my own enemies who are allied with the Saffron Tower against me and mine.”

If nothing else, it was a pretty little speech.

“No,” rumbled Firesetter. “We will not oppose them.”

“You have left their service,” I said.

“That does not mean we stand against the Tower.”

We were at a point of frustration. I did not know how to move them away from his objection. What I could offer was not sufficient.

“In the mountains above my village,” said Mother Argai, her voice distant, “there was a place we called a temple. Building, cave, ruin. It was all three. With doors cut for people half a rod tall. Blackened troughs that had once held pools of flame. A place of your people, we were always told.” She sounded almost ashamed when she concluded, “We worshipped you there.”

This was more than I had ever heard of Mother Argai’s life before the Blades in the entire time I’d known her.

“But we were gone,” said Firesetter mournfully.

“From that place, yes. Gone, but not forgotten.”

I watched the two of them, wondering if somehow this connection they shared could bind Firesetter to our cause. His Fantail, I thought, wanted to join us.

It was enough to drop this for now. She would seek to convince him. All I could do was push in a way that likely harmed my chances of securing what I wished.

“We should go home,” I told Mother Argai.

She drained her wretched beer and set the wooden bowl on the table. I could not face my own drink with its skunky taste, and so left it behind as we rose.

“Good evening to you both,” I said. “If your minds change, send word.”

“How shall we do that?” asked Fantail.

“A letter to Mother Argai at the Temple of the Silver Lily. Though it would be best to remain discreet in anything you write.”

Mother Argai nodded her agreement. “Do what she has said. I check there several times in every week.”

“Farewell,” said Fantail. Firesetter rumbled some vague agreement.

We turned toward the door and our faces to the world. I was disappointed, but not bitterly so. These two were not done with us, nor were we with them.

As I touched the handle, the door banged open from outside. Three big men shouldered in. The last glanced up at me, his mouth forming words when he stopped. Then:
“You!”

They all three drew knives and had me hedged with blades in that moment. Mother Argai dropped back and pulled her own weapons, but I was trapped. Points pressed into my leathers at my gut and my chest.