The Last Stormlord (64 page)

The thought was suddenly there in her head.
Paint him dead.

Picture him lying on the ground with a gaping wound in his chest, lots of blood. Leave his clothes indistinct, but make his face detailed. And then shuffle the future up to make it real.

Russet had never confirmed that it was possible to kill with waterpainting, but he had not denied it, either, when she had asked. And it would be so easy to try. Would they let her go if Taquar was dead? Possibly. She could save Shale from Taquar’s clutches, for certain.

But to murder a man, any man?

She shivered, the icy finality of that thought going right through to her heart. It would be so… cold-blooded. So deliberate.

I will think about it
. She’d have to be very certain before she did something like that.

She contemplated Russet’s paintings. Maybe she could change her destiny if she altered them, changed the background, for example, or removed all trace of Russet by scraping off the paint or painting over the top? She tried that on one of them but could not shuffle up anything. The shuffling had been done, and the future was fixed, no matter what she did to the paint.

She thought of altering her appearance, her real appearance. Scarring her face, perhaps. Cutting her hair very short so that she never looked like the woman in the paintings. But when she thought of doing that, the magic asserted itself and her stomach roiled and her hands shook. She would never be able to do it.

She thought of just destroying them. Tearing them up. Setting fire to them. But what if that killed her, as Russet had said? She remembered Shale had put his foot into the painting of Vato up on the rooftop, ruining it, and Vato had not been hurt. But then, the damage to the painting hadn’t stopped him from climbing up onto the roof, either.

Besides
, she thought,
maybe these paintings are all that is keeping me alive right now. If Russet hadn’t painted my older self, maybe the enforcer would have caught up with me and killed me. Or maybe Taquar would have killed me after I wrote that letter.
Instead, he was keeping her, apparently for the day when he would regain control of Shale and be able to use her as a hostage, to assure Shale’s good behaviour.

She sighed, rolled them up and put them away.

She started on an ordinary waterpainting instead, something she thought Taquar might appreciate: a portrait of himself riding a myriapede, as she had first seen him from the roof of the snuggery, a lifetime ago. She thought she captured the essence of the man well: his pride, his sensual menace, his handsome arrogance, his assurance. The magnificence of his mount. The image was engraved on her mind, down to the last details, so that part was not hard. More difficult was the challenge of eliminating the fear she felt creating his painted image.

While she worked on the portrait, she pondered what other pictures she could paint to benefit her future.

Useless just to paint the door to her prison swung open and an empty room beyond. That might mean anything: that she was moved to another part of Scarcleft Hall, for example. She thought about depicting Russet’s room and then shuffling up into that picture something that was now with her—her clothes, perhaps. After all, if her clothes were on the thirty-sixth level, she would be, too, wouldn’t she? Then she thought of other scenarios that might account for her clothes being down in the thirty-sixth—and her imagination supplied a few unpleasant possibilities.

When she finished the portrait, she left it on the floor next to her dayjar. If Taquar came back before she was ready for him, at least she had something inoffensive to show him.

On the following day, she prepared a tray with a base of motley. She painted Taquar again, this time lying on roughly depicted ground. Dead eyes stared blankly out of a dead face. A wound in his chest looked as if it might have been caused by a spear that had pierced him and then been roughly wrenched free. Just to make it clear he was dead, she painted a copious amount of spilled blood and portrayed his head lying at an odd angle.

She stared at it a long time. All she had to do was shuffle it up, and sometime in the future, Taquar would die. But how long would it take? She had no way of knowing.

And it was so sandblasted horrible to decide to do it. Cold-blooded murder…

But if I don’t, Shale might be imprisoned once more. I must do this. I must. For him.

She gripped both sides of the tray. She stared at the paint and connected to the motley, felt the magic, the power within her. Started to ease the water-motley upwards. Thought of the change she wanted to wreak. The death she wanted to make real. The
murder
.

And faltered. She lost her hold, lost her concentration, lost her determination.

She slumped, unnerved. The painting had not moved. It was still ordinary, Taquar’s clothes and the ground still not detailed or real. She was shaking, her forehead beaded with sweat.

Sunlord help me
, she thought.
I can’t do it
.

With the picture still unaltered, she hid the tray under her bed. If she was in danger from Taquar, she might want to try shuffling again, might be
able
to shuffle, so she kept it as surety. She turned her thoughts to other methods of escape, and finally, several days later, she had an idea.

She painted a picture of a place she knew well: the open hallway outside Russet’s room. Depicting the section of wall between his door and Lilva’s, she captured the detail as she remembered it: the cracks, the crumbling mud-brick, the edge of the bab-wood doors, all seen in the reddish light of dawn. It took her a while to correctly paint the long morning shadow cast by the balustrade, but the perfection of her waterpainter’s memory guided her paint spoon. When she was satisfied that she had everything exactly as it should be, she put the paint tray aside and waited till nightfall.

Her jailers had supplied her with candles and the means to light them. That night, she spent considerable time moving the desk and candle around, trying to get the best placement for what she wanted: her shadow profiled on the wall. Once she had it just right, she angled Vivie’s mirror so that she could see the shadowed profile. She was struck by a sense of unfamiliarity: it was the silhouette of a mature woman, not of a child. The nose was strong and long, the chin determined, the forehead straight and high. Her bust line was a woman’s; her waist was defined by the swell of a woman’s mature hips.

She stared, absorbing the details, the proportions, of this person she was beginning to understand. She knew now what Taquar had seen and what he had anticipated. He had seen a mature body; what she had lacked for him was her own knowledge of it. He had held back because he had still seen a child in her gaze, in her directness, and he had not wanted a child in his bed, but a woman. She shuddered in the realisation of the closeness of her escape. She could so easily have become another Amethyst. And somewhere deep inside, she knew that the next time he looked he would see what he wanted. He had awakened the very thing he was seeking, awakened it not by his sensuality but by the fear it engendered.

She took a deep breath and focused once more on the task at hand.
Do the rough sketch of the profiled shadow, a suggestion, a whisper of what is to come. Concentrate on the painting. Feel the motley below. Look once more in the mirror at my shadow on the wall. Attach the paint grains to the water, move the water, shuffle up the image…

She felt the water shiver in response to the image in her mind; she felt the shift—the rip—in time. She closed her eyes. The nausea, the knowledge that there had been a profound change in fundamental truth. She felt it all.

She opened her eyes.

There, on the painting in front of her, was the shadow she had depicted. From the lower body, which threw its dark image across the floor of the hallway, it was impossible to tell who was casting that shadow. But where the shadow hit the wall between the two doors, the profile of a head and torso was undeniably her own. She had not shuffled up herself, but her shadow. She had tricked the magic.

She allowed herself the beginnings of a smile.

And that was the moment when she was shaken, as if a giant had twisted the floor beneath her and then kicked the chair she was sitting on. She crashed over onto her back. Stunned, she lay there, unable to react. Slowly the desk toppled towards her, not pulled by her, but of its own volition, spilling paints and water from her paint tray, splashing her with water and colour.

She was so shocked, she didn’t even scream.

Scarpen Quarter

Breccia City

Level 3

When Jasper emerged from the Sun Temple on the third level after the annual Gratitudes ceremony, a person brushed close by him and pressed something into his hand. Startled, he looked to see who it was, but in the mass of people, he could not single out the giver. He was surrounded by a swarm of worshippers from all levels, hemmed in by officials and reeves and guards, pestered by a number of street boys darting in and out to see how close they could get to the rainlords. It could have been any one of them; he had no way of knowing. He looked down at the item he clutched. A letter of some kind. There was no chance to look at it just then, so he shoved it deep into the wrap-over of his ceremonial robe.

As he glanced around, he felt uncomfortable. Everyone was staring at him, whispering among themselves. He knew why, of course. Granthon had just declared Jasper Bloodstone a stormlord of the Quartern, by grace of the Sunlord and virtue of his proven power to move and break clouds. Praise to the Life Giver of the Quartern, thanks be His name, and all praise to His intermediary, the Holy Watergiver.

The robe they had then pulled over his head, with its gold embroidered hem and neckline, was heavy and hot, and it scratched. And it was all a lie. He wasn’t a stormlord. Not really. Unaided, he would have been incapable of creating a single cloud from sea water, let alone one sufficiently laden to carry rain. Oh, he could feel Granthon’s power. The way it reached out to suck up the water in the sea like dry desert soil thirsting after a man’s piss. It tingled, that power, coursing through his blood, stinging the inside of his nose and mouth and throat. But he couldn’t emulate it.

All he could do was move clouds. At that he was an expert, sending them across the sky with an ease that baffled Nealrith. He didn’t need to see them; feeling their water was enough. Guided by maps and his feel for fixed areas of water—the distant cities, the mother cisterns, the mother wells, the tunnels—he could shift clouds to the designated destinations with an accuracy that impressed even the old stormlord.

But it was Granthon—weak, half-crazy Granthon—who created the storms, even as he died, inch by inch. Without Jasper, Granthon was a stormlord with insufficient strength to move a cloud. Without Granthon to free the water from the sea to make a storm cloud, Jasper was no stormlord.

The ceremony in the temple had been a lie to give people hope.

Far better than the public acknowledgement of Jasper’s skill was Granthon’s equally public withdrawal of his endorsement of Taquar as his heir. Jasper knew whom he had to thank for that: Lady Ethelva. Afraid for the safety of her son, she had finally managed to convince her husband that any man who had done what Taquar had done to Jasper and Lyneth was unfit to rule a city, let alone a nation. Jasper had not been present at the conclusive argument on the issue—no one had except Granthon—but the servants had been full of it for days. Normally gentle Ethelva, who protected her husband from every stress, had made her opinion heard in a voice that had resonated from behind two sets of closed doors. And Granthon had caved in like a pebblemouse hole under pede feet. He had changed his recommended succession and confirmed it publicly. What he had not done was propose someone else. The Quartern was once again without a recognised heir.

“Come,” Kaneth was saying in his ear, “let’s get out of this crush.” He took Jasper by the elbow and shepherded him back in the direction of the palace, signalling for the guards to close in around them. “What did you think of your first Temple Gratitudes?”

Jasper gave a snort. “We wouldn’t waste water like that in Wash Drybone. Just pouring it into the ground as a sacrifice to the Sunlord?” He shook his head. “I don’t think the priests have any idea of what it’s like to go thirsty.”

“Probably not, at least not on this level. Some priests on lower levels often share their water, or so I’m told.”

“When did you get back?” Jasper asked. Kaneth had been away, riding the Sweepings with his men, searching for any evidence of further infiltration of the Scarpen by Reduners.

“Last night. A tame spying trip, not as exciting as chasing marauders off the White and Gibber Quarters.”

They caught up with Nealrith and Ryka. Ahead of them, Ethelva, Laisa and Senya accompanied Granthon’s litter. “What’s the news from Qanatend?” Kaneth asked, laying a hand on the highlord’s shoulder as they all walked up the stepped street towards the closest entry to the hall. “I heard there were messengers in this morning.”

Nealrith nodded unhappily. “No news. The spies couldn’t get through. The Reduners continue to hold the northern side of Pebblebag Pass through the Warthago Range. All we know for certain is that the city fell about ten days after the siege started. We guess it is still occupied and the Reduners are still helping themselves to the water.”