Endurance (45 page)

Only his face was hidden, wrapped in leather with the brass eyepieces.

Archimandrix, of course. I stared up into the gleaming blue formlessness of his lenses. “I have returned.”

“Ah,” he gasped, then shrieked fit to split the heavens.

I covered my ears until the piercing noise dropped off. The two beside me did not stir, though the brass ape clanked and settled a bit in its stance. When Archimandrix was finished, he gasped again before licking at the blood trailing from the corners of his mouth.

“Your mysteries are deeper than those I know of,” I said politely.

One of my guides reached up and began to unbuckle the bonds holding Archimandrix into his machine. After a moment he stumbled to the cold stone floor, dropping to his knees to retch. His back was covered with the same tiny scribing as his front. The skin there was spotted with welling drops of blood where a hundred or more needles had punctured him in the machine's embrace. Nausea grabbed at me. I turned away and tried to hold down a sympathetic lurch, but I lost my own battle.

When I turned back, mouth tainted with stinging bile, the sorcerer-engineer was pulling on a quilted robe. “I am sorry,” he said in a strangely normal voice. “You should not have seen that.” Fluid dripped from his brass muzzle. I reflected on how difficult it would be to vomit in such a contraption.

“I have decided I do not need to know.” My fervor stained my voice. If Archimandrix noted it, he did not remark.

“We have brought all the apes out of storage.” One of his silent assistants handed the sorcerer-engineer a small wire brush, which he used to clean his muzzle as we continued to speak. The rasping of the tool lent his voice a strange distortion. “Some of our best have been working on their punchleather instructions.”

“Are you ready?” I asked. My fear that Surali might pack up her embassy and leave was growing stronger. They held three hostages of great import to me behind those walls.

Archimandrix waved one hand, as if brushing off objections. “We will never be as prepared as we might prefer, but we are ready.”

I realized that his fellows were gathering around us as we spoke. Fair enough. They should all hear this. Time for my vision to begin falling into place. “We spoke before of the twins and the temples. But I have rethought my plans. Tonight, in the middle watch, I want your apes to surround the Selistani embassy. It is a rented mansion in the Haito style, at the corner of Ríchard Avenue and Knightspark Street. There may be some of my countrymen out front, watching the place; and a woman of my order named Mother Argai. She speaks no Petraean. Some of the men do. Together they are watching the gates for a departure. I must recover two other women of my order as well as a young girl from imprisonment by the embassy guards.”

“We are to attack them?” Archimandrix asked. The flickering blue light of the place lent him eerie highlights.

“Almost certainly, though do not swarm the walls or break through the gates. Rather, stop them if they attempt to leave. They will seek to make their way to the port. I cannot have them taking ship until I have recovered my people, and put an end to … certain plans.”

“Your god killers.” His voice was flat now, flat as his machines.

“My god killers,” I said, owning up to Iso and Osi. “I have other intentions for them now. More, well, spiritual. Along an axis of power where their strength does not lie.” Pardines, and Endurance. And, by the Wheel, Mother Iron if I could find her and once more truckle any sort of aid from her. She was the soul of this city, I had come to believe almost literally so.

A strange notion was dawning about her. I wanted to let my deeper thoughts tease the idea out before I plucked at it. “The twins cannot be allowed to take ship either. Too much is at stake.”

“We have not moved openly in the city for centuries,” Archimandrix said. “And never against our own.”

“These are not your own. I am asking you to take on my people, not Petraeans. Besides…” I could not help the grin that seized my face. “The Interim Council will bear all costs or charges arising from these actions. I am driving inimical forces out of the city at their commission.”

That was about as far from the truth as I cared to venture, for all that it was not yet exactly a lie.

Archimandrix looked back at his gathered sorcerer-engineers. “What say you brothers?”

“Much is at stake,” I put in. “If we do not act, the Interim Council will fall.”
If it has not already done so.
Lampet had raised the Reformed Council to be met with an aggravated helplessness by the assembled sages at the Textile Bourse. “The Temple Quarter will be in disarray yet again. Even worse, the greatest danger to order which has been seen in an age will prosper here.” Before passing onward to wreck my own city.
After
wrecking my own city. I was indeed a woman under two banners, however much I sought to deny either or both of them. I cradled my belly with my hands. “I want more for my daughter. Each of you wants more for yourself.”

A rumbling arose, the sorcerer-engineers speaking a language unknown to me. Short, sharp gutturals echoed, offset by vowels that buzzed as if they used the cords deep in their throats without benefit of lips or tongue. I knew a chaffer when I heard one. The Blades used to do this on occasion. We would meet as a body to overwhelm a difficult decision with dozens of individual voices, separate opinions, smoothing together like rocks in a sand barrel until they'd reached a consensus as if by summoning it from the very air.

Much more quickly than I'd imagined, the muttering died down. Archimandrix turned to me. “We will be there. How will we know your hostages?”

“Two women of my order,” I said. “Prisoners on the second storey, last I was aware. Everyone there but a few servants will be my countrymen, so do not assume that any dark-skinned female is your goal. The names of these women are Mother Vajpai and Samma. Also, a girl of about twelve, of your country. She is pale, with sandy hair in curls, and eyes somewhere between blue and gray. Her name is Corinthia Anastasia. The women will be expecting a rescue, and can be relied upon. The girl is not so wise or prepared, I should think.”

“Will you wait with us while we ready ourselves?”

“No, I must sort my other allies.” I glanced up the ladder, and decided I'd be better off heading for the Tavernkeep's place through Below. Too many up top knew me, might be looking for me. Besides, that way I could watch for Mother Iron.

Or Skinless.

I could not decide if I wanted to see Blackblood's avatar or not. That hand I would let fate deal to me.

“Farewell.” Archimandrix bowed deeply. Behind him, dozens of his fellows followed his obeisance in a rustling of robes and a creaking of leather. Their lenses flashed with the faint blue-white of coldfire reflections as they rose again, each head moving in an eerie, precise unison with all the others.

“Farewell.” I pushed through them toward a familiar passage leading east and south.

*   *   *

Several turns away, in the Station, I stopped and pulled out my short knife. I needed Mother Iron, and I could not be sure she'd find me of her own accord. Whatever ritual might call her wasn't something I knew, either, but I thought I could summon the Factor's ghost. And
he
was definitely allied with Mother Iron.

Libations are the oldest ceremony. Warriors had honored their dead from history's first battlefield, just as families honored their elders who had taken the longest sleep. The wine of a libation poured into the opened soil was nothing more than a symbol for blood spilled in combat to run into a freshly dug grave.

I had no wine, and the earth beneath my feet was stone, but blood I did have. The blade fit my right hand as well as ever it did, then turned around to slice across my left palm. I clenched my fist around the stinging pain. Blood filled the cup of my hand in a sickening rush.

When I opened my fingers, the red pattered down upon the floor in a slow, silken rain, black as old sin in this underground darkness. “Factor,” I whispered. “You are never so far from me. You stand behind all the great conspiracies of my life. Even now in death the shadow of your power writhes through this city, drawing gods and god killers and assassins from across the sea. In name of my debt to you and in the name of your debt to me, I call you now.”

It was no ritual, but the words felt right. I'd known the man in life, and I'd known him better in death, as he had passed over at my hand. We were bound as surely as any parent and child.

“What debt do I now owe you?” The Factor loomed next to me as if he'd been there all along. He still wore his semblance of living, though I could faintly glimpse the stone of the passageway through his body.

“You owe me your life,” I told him.

“Which you took unknowing. I do not see that as debt.”

“I released you from an ancient power not your own, and freed you into the next world.”

He laughed gently. “You always were one with novel ideas about how things work.”

“Where do you suppose I learned them?” In a strange way I felt almost sympathetic toward this man, the source of all my torments.

“We all make mistakes.”

Nodding, I agreed, “I am doubtless making another mistake now. I need your help.”

“You? Slayer of dukes and gods? I thought you ate cities for breakfast.”

“No. I eat rulers for breakfast. Cities give me indigestion.”

“How shall I ease the rumbling in your gut, Emerald?”

His use of that name very nearly closed my ears. I ignored the flash of anger that shot a tremor through my hands. “I am confronting another problem of the divine.”

“God killing?”

“God saving, actually.”

“You play both sides of the fence well enough.”

I shook my head ruefully. “I would rather not have the fence in my life at all, but I am afraid it is too late for that. But now, on this side of the fence, I have need of Mother Iron.”

He paused awhile, as if thinking through his next words. Erio was a ghost a thousand years older than the Factor, I was sure, but the Factor had lived centuries longer than any man might expect, which lent him an unusual substance in the afterlife. How that experience bore upon his thoughts, I could not say. It must have granted him an involuntary wisdom at the least.

Finally, the Factor spoke. “I will not bandy with you about Mother Iron. She is much older than even the farthest extent of my knowledge.”

“I do not believe she is so much more ancient than the sorcerer-engineers.”

“Tinkering fools,” he said dismissively. “Boys toying with brass and wire. Mother Iron is something else. Older.
Deeper.
”

“I have seen you in her company.”

“Yes…”

“I would speak with her.”

“She does not respond when bidden.”

“Unlike ghosts?” I asked, my voice nasty. “I never believe what people say. Not when they act the opposite. You can find her. Bring her to me.”

“Even for me, it does not work that way.” Something of a smile played across his face. “My powers are far more limited than you seem willing to credit.”

“I have no idea what your powers are, in truth. Not here in this place, at this stage of your existence. I just know you have a bond to Mother Iron.”

At this latest mention of her name, Mother Iron stepped up to my other side. Her furnace eyes glowed as if from a deep distance. As always, I received the impression that her cowl concealed immensities far larger than the space it enclosed.

“Welcome,” I said modestly.

I received an indifferent stare for my troubles.

“I am hurrying to defeat a plot against this city.”

The Factor snickered, I swear he did. Mother Iron only continued to stare. The fires in those deep-set eyes were not even shuttered by a moment's blinking.

“Another god will be stricken soon, if we do not move. And…” Here I took a breath, readying myself to play the strange card that had occurred to me earlier. “I know how to restore you to a portion of your former power.”

That was a knife throw in the dark if I'd ever taken one, but all the same, not unreasonable. Something flared in her eyes. It was the opposite of a blink, as if the fires within had been unbanked to briefly rage beneath a rain of oil.

A hit, then.

I used my own silence. Not as a weapon against her, for I could no more fight Mother Iron than I could fight a storm, but as a tool. A lever, cracking her open.

“You do not have that authority,” she finally said. As it had always seemed to do, her voice gusted deep from within a large, hollow place, bringing oven-hot air with the words.

“No, but I know of one who does. Here in Copper Downs, now.”

“Her…”

The Factor's ghost looked both bemused and puzzled in the same moment. His lips parted as if he wished to speak, but at a sharp glance from me he swallowed whatever he had planned to say. Even the ghosts feared me.

“Yes,” I replied to Mother Iron. “Her. And She speaks to me. You remember Her, from the beginning, don't you?”

Mother Iron sighed, a rumbling that reminded me of the collapse of a mound of coal. “Not the very beginning, no. But yes. I remember.”

“The days of the titanics. You are no daughter-goddess, or splinter of that era.” My thoughts ran ahead, dragging my words with them through fields of theory and foggy banks of speculation. “You are from another creation, spawn of another Urge. Much as the pardine gods were.”

“You presume.” Mother Iron's voice was hard, but carried no threat.

“I only speculate. But you have persevered, borne upon the prayers of sorcerer-engineers and existing within the echoing places of this undercity. Carried along into the currents of time without ever recovering your proper place in the depths.”