by Sylvia Kelso
They have to ease him on his face again. To mound clothes under his hips. To hold, with profane and breath-held delicacy, his arms, his torso, his re-straddled legs. “If he jerks around he’ll bleed for sure.” Kneeling between his thighs, instruments in hand, she scowls up his back at Tellurith.
“Keep hold of his head. If he starts to move—talk to him. Just might keep him quiet.”
Tellurith’s own breath comes short. Not mere human concern now. Behind her quickened heart-beat she can feel the weight, the focused attention, almost the sentience of Amberlight.
She cups the drowned face lightly as a new-polished statuette. Trying for composure, says, as at the mother-face, “Yes.”
Meaning, Go.
When the cold water starts to bite, he does move. Twitches. A gasp. Moans. Stronger flexure of the muscles as cold instruments replace cold water, probing deeper into his vital, his damaged and doubly sensitive parts. The physician mutters. Prayer. Endearment. Curse. The head in Tellurith’s lap heaves before she can catch it, his body jerks as he cries out.
“Quiet, quiet, keep still now, it’s all right, just hold on . . .” Ridiculous, crooning like a mother with a beloved baby to a complete stranger, a man who may not even use her words. But she catches his head, whispering in the drowned ear, smoothing the pain-tense cheek, wiping sudden sweat from the nameless brow. “Quiet, keep quiet . . .”
And though his body transmits shock, protest, pain atop older pain, though he lets out strangled noises and twists his head spasmodically, violently in her lap, whether of words or her cutter’s ability, something must come through.
Because whatever the physician does to him, though he cries out, he does not move.
* * * *
Full dawn on Amberlight; Tellurith watches it in from Telluir House-head’s apartment, hands propped wide on the balustrade.
The honey-tinged Iskan marble is icy under her palms; shoulders hunched in mahogany-brown double wool, she is grateful for her festival coat. Fifty miles south, snow bleaches the shaggy Iskan ranges’ spine, a drizzle of winter sure as the qherrique dust frosting her lapels. But the sky is celestial blue, freighted with blushing hills of cloud.
“’Rith?”
Iatha comes to her side. Qherrique-tough, she has already bathed and changed for the day.
“He’s out to it. Sleep-syrup should last till noon.”
Tellurith’s eyes lift slowly, sidelong. Across the House frontage, pine-cone finials topping the central block’s four-storey attic roofs, over the green mushrooms of garden treetop, the snake of demesne wall. Native scrub beyond is branded by a line of stony steps. A hundred feet above them, the Telluir qherrique answers sunshine, a moat-wall of back-lit pearl.
Iatha breasts the balustrade. Goes on equably, “If he still won’t take it for anyone else, you could always book a spot—”
“In my schedule! Blast and blind—!”
As she spins from the balustrade Iatha’s eyes go wide. Then she bites off a laugh.
“I’ve noticed,” demurely, “that Telluir carries the Thirteen’s cutting-load . . .”
Tellurith spins again, thumping fist on stone. The men’s tower is tucked behind House block and center court, with the garden as buffer beyond. She could not see the glare of sun on its shutters’ lace-work if she did turn, but it burns her shoulder-blades.
“You block-cracker, you know quite well—!”
“Oh, ah, you’ve set up a week of it. Metal shippers, estate accounts. Moon-meet of the Thirteen. New cutter to try. Three statuettes—and one of ’em a king’s—to tune. Bare compliments’ll take a month. He’s a bit of gangland flotsam. You’re Head of Telluir House. Just tell me, ’Rith—did we pick him up, or not?”
Tellurith’s jaw knots. She stares out over Amberlight.
Under the familiar frontage of distant House-blocks, Khuss and Jerish to the right, Hafas away left, the valley opens between High and Dragon Spurs, fifty-foot windmill vanes just beginning to swing along each crest. Turned on for the day-wind, they blur the squat stone towers. Already, downstairs, the visible veins of qherrique in the House-hall are glossy with new-fed light.
Sharply, Tellurith averts her mind. Stares lower, down past clan demesnes into the business zone. Warehouse, office, guild-house, coffee house. Inn. House of prostitutes.
From here the graffiti and the broken or boarded windows are invisible, leaving the city gem-clear and immaculate for dawn. And below the frontier’s battle-zone sprawl the huddled humps and gaudy shrines and strangulated alleyways of River Quarter. Workers for the ships that come, upRiver, downRiver, trailing in like water-spiders on that glittering serpentine about the city’s base. Hauling the silk and wool, the metal and timber, the multitudinous tribute to its one unique product that sustains, that recompenses Amberlight.
“’Rith?”
She tightens her fists on the balustrade.
“No, we couldn’t have left him there. Or taken him to a hire-worker’s hostel. Or expected the physician to heave him home. So, yes, we do have obligations. Have accepted obligations.” A deeper breath. “I have accepted obligations. Tell Hanni. Noon. Fit it in the book.” And as Iatha turns, face lost but shoulders grinning, she yells, “And find what he is, you lump!”
* * * *
“No, Ruand, troublecrew say, Nothing,” eloqently, Caitha’s nostrils wrinkle, “among the clothes. No money-pouch. No jewelry. Something torn out of his ear. Local clothes. Quite well-worn. Probably a lender’s shop.” River Quarter is full of them; pawned clothes are orthodox intelligencer’s disguise. The senior House physician nods, underlining their own intelligencer’s point. “Same for the cloak.”
“The boots?”
Caitha inclines her head again, acknowledging her Head’s wits.
“First-quality gazelle hide. Gold buckles. New. Cataract cut.”
Tellurith’s brows mark the double anomaly. Caitha drops her voice a tone. “No sign of—”
“No.”
No weapon at the site. Not so much as a broken sword-belt, a table-knife. Which is only absence of confirming proof: Cataract is two hundred miles upriver, just beyond Amberlight’s border. Cataract is the River’s most turbulent neighbor. And Cataract might pay a mercenary wages to merit those boots.
She and Tellurith eye the man in the bed.
The quietest bed in the infirmary, empty near a work-moon’s tranquil end. In the center of the House-block. Women’s ground. No call for Iatha’s presence to point the consequence of his vehement refusal to take sleep-syrup from any other hand. Setting the cup down, she can see her steward’s grin.
“Though I’m rotted,” Tellurith mutters, “to know why.”
The stubble is blacker now. Inclined on a snowy pillow, the hair lays a night-wing over the bloodless face. Sharp features burred by bruises, sharpened by loss of blood. Speaking anger. Decision. Arrogance. A very plausible face for a mercenary.
“Not Cataract coloring.” Mistaking her silence, Caitha begins to state the obvious. “Any more than he’s a Verrainer. And in Dhasdein, nowadays, it could be anything . . .”
With no way to tell, until he recovers consciousness, exactly what, or what provenance he will claim.
And, the physicians agree, he should stay drugged at least another day.
Tellurith lets out breath, an angry hiss. Caitha jumps.
“See Hanni. For sunset, fit him in the book. Midnight—I’ll be home first. And,” luxury, to pounce on someone, “see he’s fed.”
* * * *
“Ruand, I tried, we both did, but Caitha said don’t upset him whatever you do and he keeps throwing his head—” the novice healer wrings her hands, her companion hovers with an arm-load of soiled sheets. “And you’ll give him the sleep-syrup anyhow—”
“Yah.” Tellurith sets her lips. Yanks the skirts of another ornate
coat aside, threatens inwardly, If you wreck my evening shirt like those sheets . . . Dismisses thought of guests, an entire Uphill function waiting, the knives of long-term malice honing in Vannish House. Takes the soup cup. Works a hand under the tousled head. Murmurs, picking up cutter’s intonation, “Come along, you need liquids, drink this.”
And, repeated miracle, the pain-thinned lips relax. He mutters drowsily, a hand stirs under the sheets. Before the soup goes down, in small obedient sips.
“Now . . .”
Two sips of syrup. A demurring noise, a muzzy frown. More impulsion in her tone. Another shift of the head, a sigh. Concession, and slipping back then, into pain-blanked sleep.
“If he makes water from this, you know how to clean up without disturbing him? You know why?” Though they cringe, in truth the irritation is for herself. “I’ll be back.”
* * * *
“The Mother rot it, Iatha, I’ve broken an account meet and held up a Vannish dinner-party, and this girl’s too good a family to insult—if he won’t take it for Caitha, then let him hurt!”
In Tellurith’s workroom the girl is already waiting. Sharp Amberlight nose and copper-gold eyes, squared shoulders that speak Navy louder than the grimly subdued crinkle of Amberlight hair. Bound in a tail, since she does not yet dare the Crafter’s plait.
“Damis.”
“Ruand.”
Maiden. House-head. Inclining her head, Tellurith inclines a mental ear. Into the waltz of formalities, asking after mother and sisters’ command chain on the Wasp, in whose seven-sister cluster is the heart of city defense. What man-powered galley can hope to out-strip, out-fight, or slip invaders past those small lethal stingers, driven and armed by the might of qherrique?
“But you feel there’s more?”
“S’hur, the light-gun answers me better than anyone.” She says it without pride. “But every time I power up—I feel—” she looks down suddenly. “S’hur, there’s something in my hands . . .”
It is the proverbial cutter’s phrase: Something in the hands.
Tellurith does not sing a jubilee. Just moves to the wall beyond Hanni’s slate-strewn desk, where the deep polished glow of imported redwood yields to panels of apricot-colored stone. Skeined, patterned over with veins of pearl and silver-smoke, their flow knotted and woven like the root-falls of a banyan fig.
“This is House qherrique. Not dedicated to anyone.” She smiles, her House-head, steady-the-panic smile. “Do you think you could reverse the feed?”
“It’s cooler today,” she adds, to the girl’s dilated stare. “Soon be time to change in any case.”
And therefore easier, as every Craft child knows, to wile qherrique toward its own approaching pattern shift. Less of a shock to Downhill folk, seeing the myth of House systems made real.
“Ruand . . . Uh. I’ll try.”
A deep breath. Centering the mind. In cutter’s parlance, opening the ear. Tentative brush of finger-tips. If she can handle a big Navy light-gun, no surprise that the contact accepts. Touch, then. Awareness ebbing inward, to the secret, the inexplicable connection, flesh and rock-flesh, mind and matter, wits and light, bone and pearl.
The girl’s lips move. The fingers caress. The qherrique glows, brilliant now as in the mother-face at the moment of assent, before the cutter steps forward and stakes her life.
The veins dim back into quiescence. Over Tellurith’s waiting hand a hint, a touch, a steady spread of warmth instead of coolness breathes across the placid air.
Genuinely, Tellurith beams. “You’ve just made the winter change for Telluir House. Well done, damis!
“It was a pied block at worst, you know. House qherrique’s patient. If you’d missed, there’d be no change at all.”
She flexes her arms. The excitement of finding new potential is matched only by its relief. Crafters are the Houses’ bone-marrow; Craft-blood comes down in families, but it can disappear as quickly, as mysteriously as it comes, and its vanishment is the nightmare of Amberlight.
“So I think we’ll try an apprenticeship, next new moon, in the Telluir panel-shop. Good enough? Time enough?”
Straight into shaping, a Craft level higher than engraver or polisher; in the power-shops, the engineer’s side of the House, at a rank only below shaper of statuettes. With half a moon’s space to set her affairs in order. No wonder there is worship in the girl’s eyes.
And in a moon or so, Tellurith tells her back, you’ll be with me in the mine. If only, yet, to look.
* * * *
The next meeting is nowhere near so pleasurable. In the House-head’s formal appointment room, down on second level, entombed amid state gifts and ceremonial furniture. Including the Dhasdein water-pipe, bane of Tellurith’s lungs. As her visitor exhales a cloud of pungent skau-weed smoke, she grips her silver-worked leggings and tries desperately not to sneeze.
“Most honored, most highest . . .”
The compliments will go for hours here, working up between his aides, her Craft-heads, his private assistant, her secretary, her House-steward, his chamberlain, the phalanxes ranked out beside them on the velvet-covered stools. House-head’s cohorts exactly facing those of Mel’eth’s kinglet, ruler of Dhasdein’s arid western province, prince under the king of kings who rules downstream in Riversend, who trades only by surrogates and only through the Thirteen concerted: Dhasdein’s emperor.
Time was, perched stiff-backed on one of those lesser stools, she could be enchanted by Dhasdein garb, the ridiculous narrow trousers, the curled, pomaded hair; by Dhasdein ceremonial, so damnably long in the wind. When she could admire her mother, straight-backed yet graceful as a wind-pine, forbearing so much as a glance at the equally wonderful stew of color and shape amid the entourage. Today it is merely a wearisome ninth-year ritual. The kinglet knows, almost to a grain-weight, their asking price. As well send a shippers’ slip upRiver and be done.
Except that statuettes do not come cash-on-delivery.
Nor does a state apartment door open in mid-interview. Her eyes stay fixed, the smile holds on her mouth. The kinglet’s private aide—they have progressed that high—holds his own stride. But Tellurith’s skin traces the message up from Craft-head to Craft-head, to Hanni, to Iatha—who rises, hiatus unthinkable, to whisper in her ear.
Tellurith does not swear. Go red. Grind her teeth. As the aide finds a pause she inclines her head. Makes obeisance, deep as a River Quarter whore before his phallus-god. “Most estimable. Most splendid. House Telluir is devastated. Obliterated. There is a matter—smaller than dust, but wretchedly, mine alone. A personal obligation. Honorable, convey to His Eminence that I am desolated. I must—momentarily—lose the brightness of his face. Deign to grace our house by tasting some meager refreshment.” Her eye snags Iatha, whose grin vanishes in a punished bow. “But I will—I will within instants—return.”
As she swirls in the infirmary door the young healers flee. Caitha bends under the blast, but can still cry, “The syrup’s failed, he’s coming round, we can’t keep him quiet—!”
“The Mother blight—!”
He is conscious already, head off the pillows and struggling to heave himself up. Tellurith lunges, blind to all but images of black-caked thighs, blood’s penumbra on lucent stone.
Caitha pounces too. Pinned, panting, he struggles more desperately, only weakness ceding them control.
“Rot it, lie down!”
Strength fails. He falls back with a gasp. The eyes skewer her, so black that iris and pupil are indistinguishable, the great bruise that lanterns one orbit powering an asymmetrical glare.
“Where am I? What am I doing here?”
Tellurith’s hands drop. She does catch her jaw. And the initiative, demanding with equal cold ferocity, “Who are you?”
“I’m—”
The hauteur implodes.
“I—”
Some impossible sensation squeezes Tellurith’s heart as he goes limp, a hand to the shocked, crumbling face.
“I—I—”
The great black eyes stare up at her, dazed, lost. More pitiable than physical wreck, that disintegration of the self.
“You were attacked.” Tellurith’s mouth speaks before she thinks, in a quiet, a Head’s, almost a cutter’s voice. “Knocked out. Robbed. Badly hurt. We found you. Brought you here. This is Telluir House.”
And almost more appalling, after the look of stunned assimilation, is the pause. Then the equally dazed, “Telluir—House?”
Tellurith is House-head because, while her senior physician collapses into consternation, she can reach the sleep-syrup bottle, pour by guess-work, and say, “You need to rest. Drink this.”
“No, it’s sleep-syrup, it’s addictive, I won’t—” one feeble but determined hand fending the cup, the ruins of authority in every phrase.
“And you’re in my debt and my House and you’ve interrupted a vital interview. I’ll discuss this later. Now drink it and be quiet!”
The whip-crack is not wholly voluntary. But either that or “debt” shuts his mouth on a gasp and flush. And an equally instinctive hand-sign as Caitha re-presents the cup.
Leaving Tellurith to chew, all the way upstairs and through interminable extra apologies, on a patient who has lost his memory but kept the salute of the Dhasdein Imperial guard.
* * * *
“Cataract boots? Dhasdein salute?”
“And probably no memory.” Tellurith jerks her coat into place. “Have Zuri scratch about River Quarter, Iatha. And they can keep him drugged today as well, because the Thirteen wait for no dangle, and neither do I.”
The Moon-meets of Amberlight are held in the citadel, which, after two centuries of increasingly solid peace along the River’s length, has almost no other use. Indeed, despite the thirteen carven high-backed seats, the clammy old walls veiled in heirloom Verrain tapestries, the wide modern windows open on highest morning air and hawk-inscribed sky, the train of underlings and business paraphernalia behind each Head’s place, even the incense burners below the great boss of woken qherrique, from under the shimmering oak table there is an indubitable whiff of mouse.
