Authors: Max Gladstone
“I’m not worried about me,” Izza replied. “The kids. The others. I want them to be okay when I leave.”
“But you’re still leaving.”
She nodded.
“If you care that much, why not stay?”
“If you got on so well with your goddess, why’d you leave?”
Cat didn’t answer.
“You weren’t just some worshipper, mouth a prayer every once a while and wave some beads around. You were a saint. You did miracles. You fight like a holy woman.”
“Fighting isn’t holy.”
“Why did you leave?”
“You see a lot for a kid.”
“I’ve seen enough,” Izza said, “to know what god-withdrawal looks like.”
“Not many gods around here.”
“I didn’t grow up here.”
“Where you from, then?”
“The Northern Gleb. Talbeg country.”
“Shit.” Cat looked up at her, eyes wide, and Izza saw behind those eyes the twist of thought she hated, that she’d run from the Old World to escape: the sudden re-evaluation, the swell of pity. “Sorry. I didn’t—”
“No,” Izza said. “Not … It’s fine.” And wasn’t.
“When did you leave?”
“When there was nothing left to leave. When they burned my village out.”
“Which they?”
“Does it matter?” Izza said, but Cat didn’t look away, didn’t let the subject drop. “They came at night. They dragged us to the priestess’s house first, killed her family and then her. A knife across the throat, just like that. Then they took others. My folks. I guess they wanted the kids for … for whatever. Everyone watched. The gods screamed. I ran. We all should have run. Right? Weeks before, years, when Clock’s Raiders and the One Gleb and the Khalaveri started fighting. But a whole town doesn’t run together. They stand strong until they break, and then they all run in pieces.”
A wagon rolled past behind them, spider-golem staggering over uneven cobblestones. Izza held the ring out on her palm. Moonlight drained the yellow from the gold. She tried to feel the fire of the sailor’s soul once more, but it was gone already. She wondered if the kiss she tasted through him had been freely earned.
Cat did not speak until the street was empty again. When it was, she tested her lower lip between her teeth to feel the form of the words she wanted to say. “I” was the first, and easiest. “I was a cop, once.”
“Like the Penitents.”
“Like,” she said, “and not. I worked for—she was a sort of goddess, I guess. She asked me to chase and destroy evil. I needed her. Because I needed her, I did things that maybe weren’t evil in themselves, but close. And then, when I’d given myself up to her completely … she changed. Became more than she had been, and asked more of me in turn. It was hard to bear. It was scary. I had been a cop. I ended up, hells, I don’t even know what I ended up. ‘Saint’ isn’t the right word. Or ‘avatar.’ But close, I think. She wanted more from me than I’d ever given. And then I had to leave. Best thing for both of us. Turns out leaving’s hard.”
“I know what that feels like,” Izza said. “Faith seems fun. So does leadership. Everyone listens to you. Then you realize that it means the bastards come for you first.”
Cat laughed. “The bastards always come, sooner or later. At least a priestess knows she’ll be first in line.”
“Not much consolation.”
“No,” Cat said. “I guess not.” And: “I’m sorry if you thought I was spying on you. Old habits die hard.”
“I’ll stop stealing,” she said, threw the ring up in the air and caught it, feeling the soulstuff wound within. “With this I have enough for the kids anyway. They’ll make do.”
“What about the boy?”
Izza blinked. “What boy?”
“Skinny kid. Dark hair, pale skin, scar on his cheek. For a few days now he’s been bringing purses to that storeroom you think I don’t know about, behind the debris wall in the warehouse. Same M.O. as you—he dives into the water with the goods, surfaces empty-handed a few minutes later. What’s back there is none of my business, of course. But it attracts attention.”
“Scar like this?” She drew a fishhook shape on her cheek.
“Yes.”
“Nick.” Damn. “I’ll talk to him.”
“Okay,” Cat said. She stood and offered Izza a hand up, which Izza didn’t take. “It’s not all bad,” she said as they walked back into the warehouse together. “Being a priestess, I mean.”
“No,” Izza admitted. “But the congregation can be a pain.”
9
Kai’s skin tasted enough of salt, but she salted it anyway, licked her wrist, drained the shot glass, bit the lime, slammed the glass, sucked the juice, dropped the peel. Three tequilas. Four.
Slices of discarded lime piled sticky and sour on the table at Makawe’s Rest. Four dead soldier shot glasses among the rind wreckage caught the light of tiki torches and table candles, and reflected a distortion of the beachside bar. A tableful of tattooed local kids close by cheered and held their hands up to be tied as the last poet left the stage: a sharp-faced Kavekanese woman who hadn’t yet remade herself, bright eyed with an elegant voice, verses slipping tense and tenseless from Kathic to Archipelagese and back. Kai wondered when she planned to join the priesthood, or if. Wasn’t much overlap between poetry and priestly duties, now that the gods were gone.
Closer to the stage, denim-clad Iskari expats clapped.
Across the table, Mako raised his whiskey to the level of his milk white eyes, and made a sound Kai had learned to call a laugh: rocks ground to sand, storm water beating a cliff face, works of man crumbled to dust.
“You think the Iskari understood any of that?” she asked.
Mako turned toward her unseeing. The gash of mouth in the scar tissue of his face opened to emit a voice. “Don’t need understanding to love.”
“Then maybe you love for the wrong reasons,” she said after she finished clapping.
“Love’s still love.”
“Get many girls with that line?”
“Haven’t had to worry about that particular problem for twenty years at least.”
The Rest swirled and surged around them, a hurricane of heat even without the four tequila shots burning in her gut.
At least the ocean wind cut through the swelter of close-packed drunken bodies. The Rest had no walls, and fronted on the bay. Behind them, waves rolled against the beach, and Penitents watched the horizon, screaming inside rock shells. Drunken sun-baked tourists lounged at the statues’ feet. Sand clung to wet skin, a casing, a ward.
Kai wore a pale suit, matching hat, and dark blouse. After weeks of enforced sexless hospital-gown infancy, she was herself again, in her own clothes cut to her own body—and that body hers, too, not some nurse’s or doctor’s to prod and poke at will. She’d stopped at a salon on the way over to tame her ragged surgeon-shaved hair to a sharper cut. She walked to the Rest under her own power, with the cane’s aid, and she sat here drinking booze bought with her own soul. Gods, she’d missed this—her world, her island with its ragged and rough edges.
Glorious, but the glory wouldn’t take. Maybe it had crawled down the bottom of one of these glasses, or into some other bottle behind the bar.
Bongos drummed, and a trumpet trilled, and under the white ghostlight spots a new poet staggered out onto the thrust stage: a round Iskari man dressed all in green, waistcoat, tailcoat, hat, and slacks.
“Since when do Iskari read here? Their work’s staid for us, isn’t it?”
Mako shook his head. “This a fat guy, dressed like a cabbage?”
“Yes. I mean. Not very fat.”
“Edmond Margot. He has a bit of fire. Listen.”
She listened, and he stood spread legged and inhaled, closed his eyes and dug within him, and declaimed through noise and music:
“Shout the island is our prison
Tied in promissory chains
Waiting for withheld names
Dreaming free wind
Howl, bound world with
Painted gods and wooden
Idols worshipped hungry
For lash and cuff and needle
Scream lost souls and
Writhe beneath satin
Stains and suck juice from
Skeleton fingers and
Sing”
And on and on, rapt and rigid, chest peacocked out, neck bullfrog bulged. Heaving stomach drove air through his thick throat. The music eclipsed him, supported him, crushed him, and he staggered back, eyes wide, uncertain how he’d come here, uncertain what he’d done to earn the applause, the whistles, the jeers. He woke from a bad dream to find himself on stage, naked minded, before a room of men and women cheering. Eve, the Rest’s owner and stage manager, in her tight black high-necked dress, grabbed Margot’s shoulders and escorted him stumbling from the light as the next poet stepped up, a sandy lip-ringed Glebland boy whose sleeve tattoos showed beneath the cuffs of his ragged tunic.
“Three mothers crying / two sons gone”
Margot’s friends received him, swallowed him, applauded him, a small band of layabouts and wanderers, fat, thin, hair stringy, curly, red, black, bald, hungry.
Kai sat frozen, mouth slack, staring at Margot. She replayed the poem in her head. She hadn’t made it up, the line. How did the poem run? No rhyme, and harder to memorize in Kathic than Archipelagese, but still.
Dreaming free wind / Howl, bound world with / Painted gods
… Her words, the words from the pool, on the tongue of this damn fat foreign bard.
“What was that?” she said.
“Margot’s work, it’s pretty abstract. Once an Iskari, always. But he’s good. Never suffered a paper cut before he came to Kavekana, but that works for him, sort of. Some people suffer from not suffering. You want his gratitude, tie him up and thrash him with a cat-o’-nine for a while. Anyway’ the scholars like it. His work. Hidden Schools called him out to give a lecture there a few months back.”
“That poem, I mean. When did he write it?”
“A few months ago now,” Mako said. “Give or take a week.”
“I have to talk to him.”
“You’re drunk.”
“And you’re ugly.” She lurched off the table, and the ground heaved beneath her. Torch flames, ghostlights, flickering tabletop candles threaded webs of light through skin and wood and meat. She drowned, and gasped for air, as the room worked its way right again. When the lights resolved to stationary points, and she no longer felt the world’s spin, she sought the poet.
He stood apart from his friends at the edge of the Rest, watching the Gleblander chant his chant.
Kai groped for and found her cane, trusted its support, and ploughed into the crowd. She made slower progress than she expected. Before her fall, she would have forced her way past. Now she had to wait for waiters to cross in front of her, skirt the edge of rowdy groups that might send someone tumbling into her path or knock her cane away.
The poet did not acknowledge her approach. Up close, she could see his sweat: a slick sheen on skin, soaking his once-white shirt. His forehead shone beneath the brim of his small green hat.
“You’d be cooler if you took the hat off,” she said.
He wheeled on her, spilled his drink over his hand. His eyes were round and bright, like a frightened cat’s, eerie in his pale and sunburned skin.
“Hey, I’m sorry. I just wanted to say I liked your poem.”
His lips worked, but no sound emerged.
“The one you read.” Gods, she was too drunk for this. But the idol drowned still and forever in her head, and the scream echoed. Don’t let the swaying ground dissuade you. Close your eyes and steel your spine. “Up there on the stage. That line, you know, ‘Howl, bound world,’ that one. Is that yours? Is it a reference to something?”
He took a step back, as if she’d threatened him.
“I didn’t mean to insult you. I just heard it somewhere, before.”
The edges of his eyes tightened then, and he stared, not at her, but past her, through her. Her stomach muscles clenched and she felt the old familiar terror, ten years left behind since she took holy orders and rebuilt herself: of being made, placed, pierced, identified as something she wasn’t. She remembered the anger that followed, and prepared herself against it. But he only stared, bowstring tight, and said, in a voice of dust, “The poem is mine. So’s the line.”
“It’s new? Is there something special about it? Any reference, any story?”
“Do I know you?”
“No,” she said. “I just had to ask.”
He shook his head, and the shake moved down to his whole body. Then he recoiled from her, shouldering off into the crowd faster than she could follow.
“Hey!” She staggered after him on three legs, one arm raised. “Hey, I was just asking!” But the crowd was thick, and a big Kavekanese in a black shirt turned to say something to a friend and struck Kai a glancing blow with his shoulder, which would have been fine, but she tripped over her own cane into a waiter, who stumbled himself but did not fall. The martini glasses he carried on his tray were not so lucky.
Neon green cocktails fountained through the air. Two landed in the sand. One landed on a table, and broke into a jade fireworks display. The last struck a tourist in the back of the head and splashed, sticky and emerald with sugar syrup and artificial coloring, down her neck and into her white blouse.
The tourist stood and cursed in Kathic. The waiter stammered an apology. And two rather large gentlemen in black shirts materialized to either side of Kai, fast as if summoned by Craftwork. “Is there a problem?”
“No problem,” she said. “I’m fine.”
“There’s no reason to get upset,” said the rather large gentleman on the left.
“I’m not upset. I’m fine, I just tripped.”
Meanwhile, the waiter retreated toward the safety of the bar while the tourist pursued, stabbing the air with her finger as if she were being attacked by invisible sprites. On the stage, the Glebland poet had stopped his tirade to stare befuddled into the audience.