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.