Kalimpura (Green Universe) (43 page)

I cradled Ilona’s head, praying wordlessly even as she began to vomit a sticky, scarlet mass of blood and bile. This woman I had loved in one form or another down the years since we’d first met. Now I’d chosen wrongly.

There had been no right choice.

It was either Ilona or her daughter. One would have died while I saved the other.

Corinthia Anastasia pushed out of the storeroom with my god-blooded knife in her hand. Her throat showed a thin line of red, but the knife had not opened her fully. Thank the Lily Goddess for that.

“You killed her,” she shrieked, then dropped to hug her mother’s bloody chest. “Get away, get away, get
away
.”

My rage burst its banks as never before, even as measured by the violence that made up my life. It did not matter that I had let her mother die to save the child. It did not matter that Samma lived, waiting only to be freed now. Boiling, I cut her bonds.

“Green,” she gasped. The look she gave me was somewhere between wretched gratitude and naked fear.

Behind me, Corinthia Anastasia wailed her grief. I tried to say something, to welcome Samma back, to tell her to be glad she still lived. Something.

The words would not come. Only a great shivering of my body and heat in my blood like I had never known.

Ilona.

Turning away from Samma, I took up my weapon and stalked back down the hall, grabbing a hanging lantern as I went. Outside, I spread fire and sword and death until even the very sky was sickened of it.

No one of the Bittern Court was safe from my rage. Not the wounded, not the slow, not the elderly, not even those who had already laid down their weapons and sat on the ground with terror in their eyes at my coming.

In the light of the blazing great hall, Mother Vajpai and Firesetter finally managed to pull me from my slaughters. I fell to my knees crying, glad at least that Ilona had such a burning to see her soul onto the Wheel and wherever it might go from there.

After a while, I vomited, and cast the god-blooded knife into the roaring flames.

*   *   *

I sat on a hitching stone along Shalavana Avenue and watched the oily black smoke from a dozen burning buildings fill the sky. My eyes had dried, though I still hiccoughed my griefs. No one would come to me. Not even my closest, though Mother Vajpai and Fantail both stood nearby. Whether to protect me or to protect everyone else, I could not say.

Finally, Mother Adhiti, the oxlike woman who’d once aided me in Mother Shesturi’s handle, approached, shrugging past my guardians. She stared down at me awhile before saying, “They are broken.”

As are we all,
I thought, but I did not make that into an answer.

Mother Adhiti went on doggedly. “We did not find Surali. Or Mafic. Many of the Street Guild were either not here or have escaped.”

“They are powerless without the Bittern Court behind them,” I muttered. “Just thugs with the same clothes.” In that moment, I cared nothing of Surali or Mafic. Foolish though it was, I felt like a guttering candle, my fire dying out, even for my worst enemies. My thirst for vengeance had been slaked to the point of bursting.

So much death. So much destruction. At my hands and by my word. How could anyone lead Blades, or worse, an army, and survive within their own soul? There were not enough candles in the world to light the paths of the souls I’d struck down today.

I wanted to go back to my own children, but was afraid to bring the stench of death with me.

Mother Vajpai finally approached, reinforcing the stubborn Mother Adhiti. “Though it will be some time before we sort the corpses, we think Surali died in the fire of their great hall. Mafic as well.”

“That was Ilona’s pyre,” I grumbled.

“We know.” She knelt gently before me. “It is done now. We will carry out their dead and ours, and figure the costs. But you have broken them. The Lily Goddess will stand proud. Our lost ones are returned.”

“Do you not know…?”

“Know what?” she asked, alert for some new disaster.

“Ilona died beneath the kitchens as we rescued the hostages.”

“Ah.” Mother Vajpai’s eyes closed briefly. “Did her child see?”

“Yes.” I stared up at her. “I had to ch-choose. Between Corinthia Anastasia and Ilona. There was no t-time to th-think.”

“You know better, Green. Ilona chose when she came here with us.” Mother Vajpai’s voice was hard. “You saved the child, who had made no choice in the matter, did you not?”

“She was my friend. And almost my lover.” My chest felt hollow; my head ached. I could not face what might come next.

“Would she have chosen any differently?”

Mother Vajpai had the right of it, but that did not make me think any better of myself. Nor, did I imagine, would it improve Corinthia Anastasia’s feelings.

“Where is the girl now?” I asked sullenly. “And Samma?” I was ashamed that in my rage I had left her behind in the storeroom where her life had been held hostage.

“Stay with her,” Mother Vajpai ordered Mother Adhiti, then walked away, stumbling only slightly.

Mother Adhiti sat down beside me. She did not try to offer any comfort, which would have meant nothing to me, in any case. Her company was enough, perhaps, to keep me from falling on my knife.

That, and the fact that I had no knife.

*   *   *

Mother Vajpai returned trailing both Samma and Corinthia Anastasia. Ilona’s daughter clung to my long-lost Blade Sister as if she were the last line between life and death. Samma’s face was bleak and she limped. Perhaps Surali had hurt her here, or perhaps the wounds she’d taken from me back in Copper Downs still troubled her. Corinthia Anastasia would not turn her face to me at all.

I stared at them and found no comfort there. Samma shook her head slowly, then glanced at Mother Vajpai.

“They were with Mother Melia,” our Blade Mother supplied. She rested one hand on Samma’s shoulder. Reclaiming her, in a sense. “Waiting for word of what to do.”

There was no response to that, so I shrugged.

“I will send a handle to escort you back to the temple,” Mother Vajpai told Samma. “This is not a good day to be about the streets. You deserve to be welcomed home.”

Corinthia Anastasia whimpered at those words. She continued to keep her face hidden from me. Though she was still quite young, I knew she was no girl anymore.

My mind seized on the needs of the moment. An escort was a good idea. Certainly there were some Bittern Court survivors out there, and the scattered Street Guild. I did not have the heart to go fire their hall as well.

A little while later, the girls walked away from me hand in hand. Neither looked back. I could do nothing for them now. Or possibly ever again. At least the six women with them would keep the pair safer than I had managed to do.

I supposed I should head to the temple as well. My children were there. It was unlikely I would simply topple off this stone and conveniently die, so finding them again seemed the best thing to do. Knees creaking, I rose to my feet.

“Home again?” asked Mother Vajpai.

I gave her a long look. “Home is where my heart lies. With my heart in ashes…”

She walked back to the temple with me anyway. No one else would come near me, even now. And word must have gone around the city. I passed in an unaccustomed bubble of silence and empty cobbles, strange for Kalimpura. I was poison, frightening to any sane and reasonable person. What else was there but to flee the madwoman?

Mother Vajpai remained blessedly silent, so I spoke in a quiet voice to the Lily Goddess, to Mother Iron, to Desire. I don’t suppose it mattered if they heard me or not. I just had to spit out the bile in my heart before it drowned me.

“You have given me too much,” I said to the uncaring air. “And taken too much with Your other hand.”

No one answered. Whatever thoughts Mother Vajpai had, she wisely kept to herself.

“I would not have paid that price. Nor the other. How was I to
know
? You might as well have asked me to choose between one of my children and the other. Your cruelty is legend.”

We walked a bit farther in our bubble of silence. An ox lowed nearby, harnessed to a reeking honey wagon, but if that was a message from Endurance, I was too dense to understand. The cobbles beneath my feet were slick with crushed fruits and vegetables. The sweet rotted reek filled my nostrils. So there was a market here.

Who cared?

“I am done with You. With each of You. With all of You. I will take my children and sail until the seas are purple and there are no more horizons, and no one has ever heard of any of You.” I spat. “There. You may have that from me. That is the last service You will ever get.”

More steps in silence. The smell of spiced chicken roasting in a clay oven, which despite my blank despair, made my traitorous mouth water. Someone began to speak, and was shushed with a thump and a squeal. I was barely seeing my own feet now, let alone anything around me, but the city feared me.

That day, I likely could have struck anyone down, and the rest of them would only have stepped away in frightened silence. My thirst for violence was gone. I could not imagine feeling rage ever again. Where my soul had been was only a livid, burnt bruise.

“Go,” I told my goddesses. “Bedevil some other poor fool. We are shut. Everyone who can be safe is safe, and the rest of us walk in chains of memory. I am done.”

In time, Mother Vajpai touched my elbow. My feet had known the path back to the temple, whether or not the rest of me had been paying attention. The plaza of the Blood Fountain was a bit less of a mess. In fact, it was oddly clean. The front steps of the Temple of the Silver Lily were completely bare that day. I don’t know what I would have done if there had been swaggering Street Guild awaiting me—fall on
their
swords, perhaps—but it seemed unjust that even the beggars and petty vendors could not take their ease.

I stared up at the sweeping, silvered teardrop of this, my supposed home. It truly did resemble a woman’s sweetpocket, I realized, at least the upper portions. The lower levels spread in squat wings ornamented only by swooping pillars and curiously shaped windows. The Temple of the Silver Lily had not been the source of my troubles, but in a real sense, it had been the focus of them. I was reluctant to set foot within.

Mother Vajpai lightly touched my arm once more. “Your children need you.”

Unspoken but clear were the words,
We need you
.

If not for my children, I might have found a place to sleep and not bothered waking up. My aching breasts reminded me of what my babies required, though, and of my own body’s needs as well.

“I will go in,” I said quietly. Bleak, glum, defeated. The ashes of the Bittern Court’s burning were still strong upon my tongue. This was hardly victory in any sense.

“Come. I will have someone send you up some kava and a northern-style sweet roll. Sit with your children awhile, perhaps wash the battle-stink from you.”

“They should be upstairs.”

We walked up the unusually clean steps of the Temple of the Silver Lily and into the vestibule where I had first encountered Mother Vajpai five years earlier. At my current place in life, I realize how ridiculous this seems, but at the time it felt as if half a life had gone by between that first meeting and this moment. I am convinced that our age changes the way we see time more than anything else can possibly do.

She went around to the Kitchen Stairs; I trudged up the Pink Stairs to the Blade dormitories on the third storey. The temple was quiet, with so many of our number still at the Bittern Court or out on the streets of Kalimpura.

I wasn’t sure where they would have gone, exactly. I guessed at Mother Vajpai’s suite first. Whatever Mother Srirani’s machinations, none of the other Blades would have dared occupy the Blade Mother’s rooms unless and until they themselves had been named to the post in her stead. And more to the point, accepted that nomination.

Winding through the deserted hall, past a dozen doors, I found and heard no one. It was eerie. The place was as empty as if my vision of a temple full of women without a goddess had actually come to pass. Though at the moment, it would be more accurate to say that this was a goddess without a temple full of women.

Mother Vajpai’s door was ajar. I pushed it open, curiosity sparked despite my dullness of mind. The children were starting to crawl, and could pull themselves alongside furniture or a wall, but surely they had not yet come to the point of opening doors?

It bumped against something. I slipped inside to find Mother Argai slumped on the floor in the darkened room. No lamps lit here, of course. Why would there be?

My heart hammered in my chest as everything seemed to grow cold and dark. Ilona was dead, Mother Argai here.
Where are Ponce and my children?

Swallowing a screech of rage and grief that threatened to bubble up inside me despite my sense of deadness, I dropped to my knees beside her.

Her lips were swollen almost beyond recognition. Her breath choked. I knew from her eyes that she was dying.

“They’re here,” I said.

Mother Argai gave me a jerky half nod, then wheezed for a smidge of breath through what was left of her swollen mouth and throat. Some poison I’d rather not have known about. We always favored blades here for good reason.

Mafic or Surali, it did not matter. This murder was not done by one of us.

Had no one swept the temple for them as we’d all raced off to the Bittern Court? Idiocy? A late, traitorous partisan of Mother Srirani? Or concealment through Mafic’s own spiritual powers?

It did not matter. Mistake or deception, the killers were loose in the house of my goddess. Where my children were.

I kissed Mother Argai with that thought, though my lips stung as well, and stroked her hair. Her hand spasmed. She was trying to direct me toward the inner chamber, I realized. This was Mother Vajpai’s office, though it was unusually neat—she had not occupied the place for months, after all. Dust layered over the clean, idle surface of her desk, her leather chair, the two smaller wooden chairs for unlucky visitors.