Kalimpura (Green Universe) Read Online Free Page A

blessing unlooked for. I thanked Endurance, which seemed safe enough, and proceeded happily upon my errands.
    The Temple District was showing the first signs of spring. The trees that struggled in the great iron pots lining the Street of Horizons were putting out their first buds of leaf and flower. Vendors hawking food from carts and trays seemed to have improved their wares. People walking along the street smiled, or so I thought.
    Life was better.
    I paused in front of Blackblood’s temple. I had done murder here twice, or near as made no difference. First back in the dark days at the end of Federo’s reign as a god, I’d caused the then-priests of Blackblood to be locked within alongside Skinless, their patron’s fearsome avatar. Vengeance was exacted for their Pater Primus’ scheming treachery. The dents and warps in the great black iron doors were mute testimony to that day’s sorry massacre.
    Later, I’d fought the twins Iso and Osi, agents of the Saffron Tower, on Blackblood’s front steps. They’d died a death of women. Whatever might have become of their souls afterwards, I could only hope and pray that they writhed in the unshriven torment foretold by their all too peculiar and misogynistic faith.
    Staring at the steps, I wondered if their blood still stained the ancient, foot-polished marble. Though the steps were so worn and misused that any of a dozen shadows, stains, and discolorations could have marked the end of those wretched priests.
    What was left of all my misadventures in this city besides the broken doors? I believed then that when I sailed away sometime in the few days hence that I would not be coming back. Too many complications here. Too many deaths.
    And truthfully, Selistan was the home of my heart. My first memories were there. I harbored ambitions that my last would someday be as well.
    I trudged up to the doors. They were tall, almost twice my height, and proportioned strangely to make the entrance seem narrow even to a large person approaching.
    So much of religion was about architecture, I mused. Even the meanest godling has a shrine somewhere. The first impulse of followers seems to be to build.
    Today I was not a follower, nor a supplicant of this peculiar god of men and their pain. I was Green, come to bid my farewells to one who had touched my life with long, strange fingers. My own fingers, short and narrow and oh-so-dark in this land of the pale-skinned, tugged at the doors to pull them open.
    *   *   *
    Within stank of old sacrifice and unwashed linens. A male smell. No woman’s temple ever held such an odor. I looked around the familiar sanctuary. One time I’d descended from the clerestory, and nearly been killed for my trouble. On another visit, I’d entered this place through the tunnels from Below, and nearly been made pregnant for my trouble. Front doors were not so easy for me, it seemed.
    Narrow, dark pillars lined the dusty shadowed space like a rank of starveling caryatids. Moth-worn banners depended from the upper reaches, faded bands as bars sinister upon them where the fugitive light of day touched briefly with each passage of the suns. A reservoir of mercury stretched ahead of me in the middle—the Pater Primus’ scrying pool, where I had never seen anything but uneasy, muckled reflections.
    Notable in their absence were the god’s priests, who might presumably be found in this house of their holy. I had never seen worshippers here, and Blackblood did not have a flock as such. This temple served other needs than the usual. He favored supplicants over congregants. Every wounded man or dying boy was his. That much was obvious from the lack of benches or kneeling bolsters or, really, anything at all in this hall.
    Once again, the architecture of the spirit predominated.
    I did not bother to call out. Instead, I walked purposefully toward the deeper shadows at the rear. Beyond was the fane itself, the altar where sacrifices were taken up or turned back into