The Last Stormlord (28 page)

She closed the door behind her and started down the stairs. She knew the trick to dodging any added workload: you looked busy. So she hurried, clutching her bundle as if it was a pile of dirty bed linen. Once downstairs, she walked briskly past the kitchen and let herself out of the back door.

She was surprised at just how busy the streets were at night, surprised to find that the people of Scarcleft flung open their doors and brought chairs out to sit in front of their gateways. A young lad was trying to impress his friends with his dubious mastery of the intricacies of the lute as he sat on his doorstep. Residents ambled by, visiting their neighbours. A peddler, tray hanging from a strap around his neck, sold hot cakes rolled in honey for a tinny token.

She had feared people would think it odd for someone of her age to be out in the streets at this hour after sunset but she found she was just one of many. She used her bundle to make it look as if she was a servant on an errand and found it easy enough to slip by the occasional patrolling enforcer. With a pang, she realised how much she had missed, growing up in the snuggery. At this hour of the night, she had always been too busy working ever to wonder what ordinary people did with their lives.

I’m sorry, Vivie
, she thought,
but I’ve got to do this.

She did not go directly to Level Thirty-six. Instead, she climbed up to the tenth, to Amethyst’s. As always, Jomat answered her pull of the bell with sour suspicion.

“What are you doing here?” he asked. “What makes you think that the arta will want to see
you
in the middle of the night?” Even in the cool of the evening, he was sweating. He reached out and pinched her cheek with damp fingers, but Terelle stood her ground. Fortunately, just at that moment Amethyst entered the courtyard and waved Jomat away.

“I’ve run away,” Terelle explained once they were seated inside, away from Jomat’s eavesdropping. “I’m going down to live on Level Thirty-six. But I’m scared to go there at night, so I wondered if I could stay here. Just for tonight.”

However, by the time Terelle had told the whole story, Amethyst looked no more pleased than Viviandra had. “Have you seen where this old man lives?” she asked.

“He did show me. It’s just a single room, but it’s clean and large.”

“Hmm. I have seen some waterpaintings. Perhaps they were his work. I’ve seen the one Kerkil the singer has in her front hall. She said the artist was a strange old man, an outlander. Did he tell you his name?”

“Russet Kermes.”

“Russet, yes, that was him. Artisman Russet. It’s the same person.” Amethyst stirred uncomfortably. “Terelle, are you sure? What’s that old saying… ‘Don’t hug the ghost out of fear of the corpse.’? You are not stepping out of one brothel door and into another, are you?”

“I—I don’t think so. I spoke to some of the people who live in his building. They said he’s been there about a year. Before that, he lived in other cities, or so he told them. They say he spends a lot of his time uplevel, where the rich pay him to do waterpaintings. And that he sometimes goes to the other cities, too.”

“But?”

“They—they don’t like him much. I think it’s just because he is different. I don’t think he’s from the Quartern. He has a really funny way of speaking, his arms and legs are painted with patterns and his clothes are weird. And he’s not terribly friendly.”

“Wherever he comes from, he will be waterless here, dependent on what he can earn.” She continued to look at Terelle in concern.

“He’s old, Arta. Very old. He couldn’t do anything to me that I didn’t agree to; he wouldn’t be strong enough.”

“Few people make offers to complete strangers without wanting something. He told you he wanted an apprentice—why?”

“He’s old. He needs help,” Terelle replied defensively.

“I hope that’s all.”

Terelle shivered, but said nothing.
Hug a ghost…
One part of her knew that she was foolish, tucking her fears away in a corner of her mind instead of bringing them out and confronting them.
What did the old man do to the painting to make it change? How is it possible to make a portrait of a real person out of a few suggestive splashes of paint?
Scarier still:
Why had the woman he portrayed then stepped into the street? Coincidence? Or had the painting
made
her do that?
Her mouth went dry at the thought. And then, perhaps the scariest of all:
How did he know my name?

“I have the painting he did,” she said. She spread it out on the floor at her feet so that Amethyst could look at it. The dancer studied it, sipping her tea. “It is very powerful,” she said at last. “I would not like to cross the man who did that.”

Terelle regarded the artwork anew. The painted sunlight bathed the beaten earth of the roadway in heat, the door to the house hung loose in breathless air. She reached out a finger to touch the paint and it was a relief to find that it was not warmed by the sun. The feel beneath her fingertip was just paint, not dust. Powerful, true—but already the power was fading, just as he had said it would once it was cut away from the magic of water.

That night, bedded down on the divan in the reception room, Terelle did not sleep well. Her dreams were disturbing, her fears surfacing in vivid inanities, all horribly real while she was asleep and stupid when she was awake, but which left a residue of worry behind like dregs in a dirty glass.

Dream and reality merged halfway through the night when she awoke to the feeling that there was someone in the room. She opened her eyes a crack. A figure was moving around holding a glimmer nightlamp. It barely cast a glow, but it was enough for her to recognise Jomat; his bulbous stomach and suppressed wheezing were unmistakable. He placed the lamp on a table, shielding most of its light with his body. He stealthily rifled through the bundle she had brought with her. She opened her mouth to scream out a protest, but thought better of it. She didn’t want to embarrass Amethyst. There was nothing for Jomat to steal; her tokens were all under her pillow. And his stealth told her he wasn’t intending to molest her.

She held her breath and watched through slitted eyes while he pulled out her waterpainting and unrolled it. He picked up the lamp to look at it properly, then carefully rolled it up again. Even more carefully, he replaced everything the way it had been and crept out of the room.

Terelle expelled her breath.

He was spying
, she thought.
But he can’t be interested in me, not really. He knows why I come, and the reason is harmless enough. No, maybe he’s just a snoop.
She knew handmaidens at the snuggery who were like that: girls who just wanted to stick their noses into everything, looking for secrets because secrets gave you power over those with something to hide. And then another thought came:
Maybe it’s really Amethyst he spies on.

She hadn’t thought it was possible to dislike that man more than she already did. Uneasily, and for no reason she could define, she regretted that he’d seen the painting.

From the Gibber Quarter to the Scarpen Quarter

Shale was in pain and the pain was everywhere.

He welcomed it. Pain kept him from thinking, and thinking would have been a worse agony.

He had been flung, stomach down, across the back of a myriapede. His hands were tied with hemp to one side of the beast, his legs anchored to the other side. The flexible multiple legs of the pede made for a smooth ride, but just being bent over in the middle for so long created tangled knots of agony in his sinews and cramp in his muscles. The black chitin of the pede heated up beneath him and the sun beat down on his back.

Every hour or two his captors stopped for a short rest. There were only two of them: two pedes, two men, still with their faces wrapped in their red cloths.

Why only two? Where were the rest?

Still killing a settle.

A whole settle.

Stop thinking.

Citrine…

Stop thinking.

Mica.
They hadn’t killed Mica. Or he hadn’t seen them do so.

They had herded everyone who was still alive, including Mica, in one direction and taken Shale the opposite way, to load him onto the pede. But so many had died before that. He saw their deaths still. He remembered their screams.

Stop thinking, you sand-leech! Concentrate on the pain. On the aching muscles. On the heat. On your thirst. On anything.

Two men on pedes. Heading up the wash towards the next settle. With him tied up like a sack of salt. His head bumped on the saddle cloth. It was thickly embroidered with patterns and swirls. The kind of thing his mother had stitched.

She was dead. He had seen the spear in her stomach. She’d actually tried to attack the man who’d snatched Citrine. Who would have thought she would be so brave? She’d always cowered from Galen. She’d never made the slightest attempt to defend Shale from his father.

They had singled him out. They had known his name. That man, the leader, had been looking for him. But not to kill him. To take him away. To the Red Quarter?

I didn’t tell anyone, Lord Taquar. I didn’t tell anyone about knowing water!

So how then had the sandmaster known his name?

He stared at the carvings on the pede segment near his cheek. They showed some early event in the life of the pede: apparently he had fallen into a sinkhole and Reduners had pulled him out. And that was how he had been caught and tamed. Shale wondered about how the Reduners made the carvings. Did it hurt the pede? Did they use a knife? Did the owner do it himself, or did he employ a special person to do it for him?

Stupid questions when his sister’s blood was drying on his clothes. He’d felt the stickiness of it on his skin, before they tied him down.

Citrine.

Don’t think about it.

If they were going to kill him, why hadn’t they done it back at Wash Drybone Settle?

And Mica. Blast the withering bastards, what were they going to do to Mica?

They stopped at nightfall. They untied him and gave him food to eat, a blanket from their packs to sleep in, a water skin. He asked them where they were going, what they were going to do with him, and they didn’t reply. When they spoke to each other, they muttered in their own tongue. Even when he heard, he didn’t understand much. He ate, even as he thought his hunger was a betrayal of those who had died that day. They tied his legs together then and pointed to the blanket. He wrapped it around himself and went to sleep. He thought he wouldn’t be able to; he thought oblivion would be banned to him for the rest of his life; he believed that last scream of Citrine’s would keep him awake forever. And yet he slept, fitful sleep studded with the spikes of tortured dreams, impaired sleep that left him weary and sick.

When he woke in the morning, he vomited; he had the worst headache he had ever had in his life. He didn’t want to eat, so they gave him water. The next thing he knew, it was hours later and he was lying lengthwise on the back of a pede, a packpede this time. He was tied to a baggage pallet like a sack of bab fruit. Two Reduners rode the beast, one at the head, the other at the back. They had not bothered to wrap their faces. He didn’t think these were the same men who had guarded him the day before. The myriapedes those first men had been riding had vanished, and now there was more baggage than there had been.

He tried to make sense of what had happened, but drowsiness overcame his senses.

After that, his conscious moments blurred into a series of vague images as confused as any dream. Sometimes he was in a camp, wrapped in a blanket; sometimes he was lying on the baggage pallet, and they were moving. During other half-lucid moments, aware of the agony of aching muscles and a bruised body, he ate, drank, relieved himself. Most of the time, though, he just slept. Every time he struggled awake, when he thought he was beginning to make sense of what was happening, the clarity would slip away once more. He tried to ask where they were taking him, but the men just laughed and said things he couldn’t understand.

Several days passed before he made the connection between the water they gave him and his inability to stay awake. He tried to refuse to drink, but they forced it down his throat and he couldn’t remember what happened next. Hours later, he woke on the back of the pede, muscles screaming.

Then one night, after accepting the food and water they gave him, he felt better, not worse. More alert, for the first time in days. When he slept, it was in snatches, lightly. He wondered if they had run out of whatever it was they had been putting in the water, and began to feel hope.

*   *   *

He was dreaming. Someone was shouting, but he couldn’t see them. “What happened to the brother?” a voice growled, irate. “Where is he? Mica? Where is the one called Mica?”

Someone replied, but he didn’t hear what they said.

Then, “Yes, I know she died! But there was a brother. Tell me, or—”

Something knocked against him. He woke, terrified. People were fighting around him. He struggled up, entangled in his blanket. He kicked himself free and scrambled to his feet, heart thudding in the suddenness of his terror. Two men, just dark shapes in the starlight, rolled past him. They were grunting, punching, wrestling. He didn’t know why, and he didn’t care. All it meant to him was an opportunity to escape.