Authors: Max Gladstone
15
Izza returned to the warehouse late, tired, scared, and found Cat seated in the center of the floor, legs crossed so each foot rested on the opposite thigh, hands palms up on her knees. Cat’s green eyes reflected the thin light that filtered through the broken warehouse roof.
“I found Nick,” Izza said. Her voice shook. She steadied it. “I told him off.”
“Thank you,” Cat said. “Must not have been easy.”
Izza nodded. She stood by the hole, and did not enter the warehouse.
“You want to talk?”
But the words hung on empty air. Izza was gone already. She climbed to the rooftops, and crossed a few blocks over to bed.
The next night she brought Cat food and water, and the next and the next after that, but each time she said “you’re welcome” when Cat said “thank you,” and left.
On the fourth night, when she entered the warehouse, she heard footsteps behind her. She turned fast, felt the food she’d brought slosh in the wicker basket. Cat crouched in the hole they used for a door, blocking Izza’s avenue of escape. “Hey,” she said. “Are you okay?”
“Get out of the way.”
“You’ve been on edge. If we’re watching out for one another—”
“I never asked you to watch out for me.”
“What happened that night, with Nick?”
Izza walked to Cat’s bedroll, set down the basket and the water jug, and turned back. “I took care of it,” Izza said. She wanted to sound blunt, badass, but she knew she didn’t.
“Something scared you. You want to protect yourself. I get that. So do I. I need to know if we’re in trouble.”
“If you’re in trouble, you mean.”
“If you’re in trouble, so am I.”
“We’re fine.” But she was tired, and alone, and Cat remained in front of the exit, not threatening, just there. The woman had saved her—they’d saved each other. She deserved to know. “When I found Nick, he was about to get caught. Basically. I tried to keep him safe. Ended up running from a Penitent.”
Cat stepped into a shaft of moonlight. If Izza wanted, she could sprint around the other woman and out. She didn’t. “You got away.” Cat said it like a fact, but there was a question hidden.
“No. I got caught. Don’t worry, we’re fine, nobody knows about you. Someone saved me. Bailed me out. I didn’t—I didn’t even know him.”
“A kid?”
“No. A man in a bad green suit.”
“What’s his angle?”
“I don’t know,” Izza said. “He asked me about the Blue Lady, that was all. And he looked at me like they do.”
“Like the kids.”
She nodded. “Like the kids.”
“The Blue Lady, that’s the story you tell the children.”
“More than a story,” Izza said. “She’s real. Or she was. But she was ours. That guy doesn’t know her. Couldn’t.” She was pacing, and she hated pacing. Her hands hovered in front of her, palms up, cupped as if to catch rain. When she noticed she stuffed them in her pockets.
“But he asked about her anyway.”
“He did.”
“What did you say?”
“I ran.”
“Okay.”
“Hells, do you mean ‘okay?’” She wheeled Cat, but she did not flinch. “Why should I let another person come to me for help? Help people and you get caught. They stick you in a Penitent forever, if you’re lucky. If not, you just die.”
A rat scampered over a box in the shadows. Beneath the warehouse, Izza heard the waves.
“You’re a good person,” Cat said.
“You say that as if it’s a problem.”
“It makes what you’re trying to do harder.”
“What do you think I’m trying to do?”
“Survive,” she said.
“I’ve survived this far.”
“But it’s not easy for you. You want to help people, even strangers”—and she tapped her own chest, below the collarbone—“of debatable character. But that way of life means sacrifice. You don’t belong to yourself. You live in, you know, connections. Duty.” She broke off, shook her head. “Listen to me. As if I know what I’m talking about. I’m the wrong woman to offer advice. Life sucks, especially for good people.”
“I knew that already,” Izza said.
“Sure.” Cat sat beside Izza on the bedroll. “It’s not like the world comes down to one neat choice—help myself or help other folks. Survival and duty. More like, every day we make a hundred little choices, and sometimes they contradict. Hells.” She lay back, arms crossed behind her head, and stared up at the ceiling. “Now you see why I suck at being a priest.” She sniffed. “Food smells good.”
“Plantain,” Izza said. “With chicken.”
“Thank you.”
“Have you ever had one of those clear choices? Between duty and survival?”
“Yeah. I guess.”
“What did you choose?”
Cat didn’t speak for a long time. At last, she shrugged. “I came here.”
16
Cat took long walks every morning around sunrise. Izza followed her for the first time a few weeks after the affair of the purse, the Penitent, and the poet. Let the tables turn for once. She hung back a block, hiding in crowds and behind rubbish bins, and watched.
Cat strolled south along Dockside, warehouses to the left and wharfs to the right. Tongues and odors mixed on the air: Iskari and motor oil, sweat and leather, Camlaander and Archipelagese and some Shining Empire dialect like silk-muffled cymbals. Oxen strained each step to pull cargo-piled wagons. Old fishermen perched on the edges of docks, still points amid the surge of traffic. Thin long bamboo fishing poles bent under their own weight, and the line’s, and bait’s.
No fish yet.
Cat moved stiff and sore. How much of that was injury and how much withdrawal, Izza could not say. Pieces of both, likely so intertwined Cat herself could not judge. The woman kept her hands in her pockets, her head down. She stopped every few blocks to sight the distance to Kavekana’ai with her thumb, then knelt and scribbled figures on the sidewalk with a piece of chalk. Izza couldn’t make the figures out; every time Cat moved on, she erased the marks with a swipe of shoe or palm. Only an illegible smudge remained.
Once, Cat bent to mark up a loading dock, but a drover chased her off before she could erase her writing. She apologized, crossed the street, and walked on. Izza ran to the ramp after the drover’s cart passed, and knelt to read. Five men pushed squeaking wheelbarrows down the sidewalk past her. She had not expected to understand the language Cat left behind, but she couldn’t even place the script. Sharp lines and angles, letters made for chisel and knife, and beneath it all a great smiling mouth.
“Following me for a reason,” Cat said behind her, “or just bored?”
Izza spun and rose, weight on the balls of her feet, ready to fight or flee.
Cat stood well out of reach, arms crossed, grinning a slight self-satisfied grin.
“Don’t worry about it. Come on.” She nodded south. “Walk with me.” Before they left, she erased the signs.
They passed old folk seated behind carpets spread with baubles of almost-silver and not-quite-gold, sculptures of imitation lapis and real handwoven grass. The farther south they walked, the wider the streets grew. Steel and glass and poured concrete displaced stone and brick and plaster. The ships moored at dock changed, too. Fewer sails, and less wood; more metal, more towers glimmering with sorcery. Cranes swung to load and unload. Gears ground and the smell of spent lightning overlaid that of smoke and sea. The people here did not ramble, but moved from point to point, or in circles, like gears themselves. Zombies guarded the gates of chain-link fences. Cat paused every few blocks to make and erase her notes.
“What’s that for?” Izza asked.
“For safety,” Cat said. “And for the future.”
“I thought you were just trying to draw me in.”
“That too.” She cracked her neck, and then her knuckles.
“Looks like a religious symbol.”
“It is, kind of. You know how gods aren’t allowed on the island? They’re nervous about contamination up there on Kavekana’ai, want to keep other deities as far away as possible. Customs block even a trace of joss.”
“Sure.”
“I still smell of old goddess. That’s why I was in trouble the night we met. I’d snuck on a ship, but customs found me; I jumped ship and swam to shore, but the Penitents caught my scent. I don’t want that to happen again, so I leave marks and holy symbols, spreading the scent around.” She threw the chalk up in the air and caught it. “Classic misdirection. So what did you track me down to ask?”
“Am I that obvious?”
“Pretty much.”
They passed a fenced-in yard where Penitents marched between shipping containers, opening one after another for inspection while nervous men with clipboards watched. “What happens when a goddess dies?”
Cat’s stride caught. She turned back to Izza. “Hell of a question.”
“You know more about gods than anyone I trust.”
Cat leaned back against a warehouse wall to watch the customs Penitents work. “Same thing that happens to anyone else. She goes away.”
“To her worshippers, I mean. If a goddess dies, what happens to her people? They were connected, through her. Does that connection last?”
In the customs yard a Penitent broke open a crate. Wood splintered, and packing cloths fell away to reveal a statue of a four-armed Dhisthran goddess. A clipboard man shouted in protest and produced a sheaf of documents, which the Penitent ignored. “Sometimes,” Cat said. The word sounded hollow. “When gods die they leave bodies behind. Those bodies tie faithful together. The bond sticks. Its meaning changes. Weakens, over time. Like when you lose a friend: you’re still tied to everyone else who knew them. Sometimes the bond helps. Sometimes it makes the whole thing worse. For priests and the like, most of the time it’s worse. They’re tighter bound. They know how much they’ve lost.”
The Penitent lifted the goddess statue and carried it to a white wagon packed with religious contraband: reams of printed leaflets, piled prayer beads, heaped ebon effigies. The clipboard man tried to pull the goddess from the wagon, but he wasn’t strong enough to lift her. The wagon rolled away toward impound.
Cat made her marks on the wall, chalk scratches and the eyeless smile, and erased them once more. Silver dust stuck to her palm. “I’m done. Let’s go.”
They left the clipboard man staring after his cargo, or his goddess—Izza couldn’t tell which.
17
Kai lay bound on an iron bed in the dark.
Leather cuffs cased her wrists and ankles, held her rigid to the rails at the bed’s foot and sides. A harness tied her shoulders to the frame. She could not move up or down, left or right. Her attempts to rise twitched her on the rough cotton sheets, like a live moth pinned through the wing. She stopped. Breath rasped in her throat.
The ceiling hung above her, unfinished stone painted black by shadows.
She heard others. The sound she’d taken at first for the rush of waves was in fact breath—the breath of several hundred breathers, soft, harsh, rapid, slow, pained. Past the iron rails lay another bed, a man tied atop it, and beyond that bed another and another still. Thousands maybe, too many to count, arrayed in a grid. Transparent tubes ran from Kai’s wrists and stomach and nose to trail along the ground. Similar tubes sprouted from each prisoner. Dangling IV bags fed drugs into immobile arms. The room was so large she could not see its walls.
Her heart beat panic. She lay still, and felt no pain. Intentional. Pain was anathema to this place. They wanted her quiet, asleep.
Then she heard, beneath the breath, the whispers. At first she thought them patterns like those the mind imposed on any chaos: song in the surf, a voice from the crackle of a burning bush. But as she lay trapped she heard the words repeated.
“Help us.”
“Hear us.”
“Save us.”
She wanted more than anything to answer them, but a mask bound up her mouth. The most she could manage was a faint moan through closed lips.
She yanked again at her manacles, twisted her hands inside them. Leather chafed and cut. The left cuff was looser than the right. Cupping her thumb into the nest of her four fingers, she pulled. The meat of her thumb caught, and beneath that meat the angular protrusion of the joint.
She pulled harder.
The pop as her thumb joint gave echoed through the room, or else only in the confines of her head. She strangled her own cry. She wanted to be sick, and could not. The tubes would not let her.
With four good fingers she tore at the buckles of her mask. Metal bit her fingertips, but at last the buckles gave, and she gasped fresh air free of leather and dried spit. “Help!” Her first shout cracked midway through and fell, a broken bird. “Help!” The second had wings. “I’m here!” No answer but echoes. The whispers stopped. “Let me go!”
Footsteps struck stone. She craned her neck up and saw a woman drift down the aisle between beds, white coated, hair up in a bun.
Kai clawed at the harness that bound her shoulders, but found no buckles to open. Nor could she pull her right wrist free.
The footsteps neared, and stopped. The woman loomed over Kai like a mountain. Her face seemed familiar. A mother’s face.
She caught Kai’s wrist. Kai fought, but was too weak, too slow. The woman held her without effort.
“I’m sorry,” the woman said. Kai realized she was crying.
The needle was sharp. She barely felt it slide into her arm.
* * *
“Gods and demons.” Mara held her coffee mug with both hands, but still it shook. She sipped, and stared out the restaurant window over the ocean. “And how long have you had these dreams?”
“Since I got home,” Kai said. They sat in the main dining room of the Grande Flambeau, all white, pine, and linen, the kind of place rich pilgrims ate. A skeleton in a hooded cloak read a newspaper by the gilded ornamental fireplace. Two bankers, a pale-skinned Iskari woman and a shorter man, probably Quechal, argued about interest rates at the next table over. Cotton light filled the air: everything here reflected. Kai sank into the opulence, into the silk tablecloths and cushions. The bay beyond the window glimmered. This at least was not a dream. “Maybe longer. I first remembered the nightmare a few days after I came down off the mountain, but it felt familiar then.”