Amberlight

by Sylvia Kelso

  Not, Tellurith does not have to retort, last night.

  “No, ’Rith.” Iatha, patient over the last evening wine. “No downstream passengers. I’ve sent Wasp after the upstream pair.” As Tellurith opens her mouth, “Customs check.”

  One more danger, one more deceit, cozening the Navy atop all the rest. Only a matter of time until the Thirteen find out.

  * * * *

  “Mother blast, ’Rith, you have to get some sleep. Take syrup, will you? What do we do if you fall apart?”

  * * * *

  What if a whore, a gang, a simple River Quarter brawl has killed him, and left the river to clean up? What if he has left Amberlight, but not alive?

  “No, ’Rith. A very tidy survey, and no bodies in any of the usual places down the bank.”

  * * * *

  If he never left the city, he must still be here. Tellurith sits at midnight by her dining table, staring out across Amberlight under a sinking moon. Wine decanter at her elbow. Stockinged feet on a chair.

  Disguise?

  But that was always understood. Money, again.

  The same if he left. Her thoughts traverse the tired pathway. Up or down the River, without money, there is no escape.

  Her jaw falls. Her blood stops. Then she slams her forehead, before she bounds off the chair.

  Idiot. Imbecile. Bag-brained moron. Check the bridge! He’s gone into the Kora! Tried to steal a horse—or walking out!

  * * * *

  Dead Dyke, the guard canal, cuts Amberlight’s peninsula on the hill’s western side. Its gates are opened to clear the stagnant water once a month, the center of its single span swing-bridge is cranked apart each night. Between gate-fall and dawn, nobody leaves Amberlight afoot.

  “The gate-watch remember a strange woman that morning. Very good but muddy clothes. A cloth round her head. A vile hangover, she claimed. Cheated in River Quarter, and going to lie up till her House cooled. They even told her a hidey-hole along the bank.”

  Khey’s story. Winkled from Iatha, no doubt, since he never met Khey herself, drawn out with casual questions like, How did you first find me? Silently, Tellurith fumes.

  “No doubt the whore can act. And think. And charm.” Iatha’s forehead is rutted like a road. “But . . .”

  We can trace him in the Kora, it is only a matter of space and time. Raise the countryside. Warn the borders. A matter of time.

  But it comes at a price.

  Tellurith gets up abruptly, and goes to the balustrade in her shirt-sleeves, heedless of the wind that razors Amberlight. Up the hillside, the pines surge and wheel like great dark sinuous windmills; half a day’s feeding has put a glistening luster on the qherrique.

  She turns on her heel. Striding back inside, says more abruptly, “Yes.”

  Raise the Kora. Pass the news and description of Telluir’s escapee to the Thirteen’s clans. To the Houses themselves.

  * * * *

  “The man has given us nothing—absolutely nothing—solid. He can’t remember his name. He couldn’t remember what the sea is! Oh, there’s no doubt he’s been an agent of the highest rank. Shall we write to the Emperor and ask, Excuse me, are you missing any top trouble-makers in Dhasdein?

  “Or would you prefer to ask in Cataract?”

  Eleven of the Thirteen flinch. Lounging on an unmoved elbow, Maeran drawls, “Isn’t this, now, a City case?”

  “First,” Tellurith’s purr is icy, “we have to get him back.”

  “We.”

  “You can sit on your hands if you choose, while we alert Telluir holdings. Whose problem is it, if he gets away?

  “There is no certainty,” the last throw, “that his memory will stay lost.”

  Damas scowls. The others squirm. Eyes turn to Jura, in the president’s seat.

  And Jura, faithful Jura, pulls her lips down. Lifts her shoulders. Braces them, and says, “First we get him back.”

  * * * *

  “’Rith—’Rith! Dammit, are you listening? Zhera and Fathyar’s lot are at it again—you’d better get down there, fast!”

  A pair of rising families, first generation in the polisher’s shops; uncertain in their House eminence, the two girls who put them there antagonistic as apprentices, clashing as Crafters, catalysts for a feud that has run to a score of irruptions over washing-space and procession-precedence and partners and apartment-rights, and bids fair to draw in the entire Craft. Tellurith curses under her breath and runs.

  The combatants have disrupted the whole shop: apprentices, crafters, Sfina herself, Shapers’ head, are surging and bawling in the bell of corridor before the Shapers’ wing. Tellurith grunts un­der her breath. Then grabs the nearest arm, Desis, seasoned trou­blecrew, and snaps, “Shut ’em up!”

  Desis does.

  “I told you,” though Tellurith barely whispers, it is clearly audible, “not to do this again.”

  Sfina rolls her eyes in seconding wrath, frank gratefulness. Apprentice eyes bug, Crafters suddenly recall business. The mass of leather aprons and irate faces melts away. To reveal Zhera’s mother gasping against a wall where Desis’ elbow has lofted her, and Fathyar’s mother sitting foolishly on the floor, and the two principals gulping as if they had met a Heartland tiger face to face.

  “Didn’t I?”

  Zhera’s mouth opens. And shuts.

  “You have disrupted the shop. Insulted your Shop-head. Upset your families.” A pair of men’s heads vanish down the quarters’ passageway. “It’s inefficient. It’s also unseemly. You will each gift the Mother your work-fees for a month.”

  Zhera’s copper-brown eyes bulge, Fathyar’s jowls purple. The mass of current work is as well-known as the pair’s avarice. An eye-corner gives Tellurith Sfina’s gleeful beam.

  “If it happens again, we will be able to proceed without you. Both of you.”

  Both faces change color. The ultimate threat. Not simply loss of status and wealth and position, but banishment.

  Exile from the qherrique.

  Tellurith swings on a heel, and tells Sfina, “In the Work-mother’s hand.”

  Invocation. Work-prayer. House-Head’s prerogative, sealing her decree as immutable.

  Stamping off wet leaves at the inner House door, she wonders, Why was I so absolute? Why should my temper, usually longsuf­fering with House squabbles, fire like a mishandled block?

  * * * *

  “Ruand?” Hanni this time, in some trepidation. “There’s another problem on the docks.”

  Where, once again, the friction point of wages has ignited the stevedores; River Quarter overflows with Craftless, jobless, homeless folk, their numbers rising every year. The Houses have undercut each other, driving work-rates down, for the last thirty years, and against Crafts, or professions like weavers and engineers, the Longshore Guild is a laughing stock.

  “Blight and blast it,” Tellurith mutters as she clambers from her House vehicle amid a clot of troublecrew onto Telluir’s sector of Main Quay. A familiar scene nowadays: carrier stopped, driver and power-handler vanished. As semi-Crafters, able to work with qherrique, they are all too often the focus of dockers’ wrath. Warehouse staff barricade the door, light-guns drawn if not charged, confronting a tangle of ragged, raggedly gesturing men.

  And stones litter the interval of empty street.

  Tellurith steps forward. Stops, at the repulse of an unyielding troublecrew back. Silent message that they will not let her closer. It is not safe.

  No women beyond the gap, to salt rebellion with sense. Women are preferred workers when there are jobs, women are more often kept on when jobs are lost. Inwardly, Tellurith sighs. Says over her shoulder, “Get Shiro.” The warehouse controller. Then she raises her voice and shouts across the gap, “Do you have a speaker there?”

  Shiro to summarize the episode; a speaker as the single voic
e with whom she can negotiate.

  They are outside for three solid hours. A day’s prime work-time, from mid-morning past noon. A bleak day, growing sharper as the clouds thicken and the wind gets up. Sliding back in the vehicle, gratefully loosening a fur collar that has hardly checked the gusts of southerly howling along open dock, Tellurith glances at the workmen, moving now toward the unprotected wharf-edge, and carefully does not think, No fur collars there.

  * * * *

  Winter in Amberlight. Warm inside the House, savage on the docks. And in the Kora beyond?

  Rain, bitter winds, mud that chafes the very beasts. Flocks can die of exposure, if a bad wind blows from snow on the Iskans, on a truly rainy night. The inns take money. And farmers are wary, surly, whether eking a living on common ground, or warding some House demesne.

  In the Sahandan, the rice district, there are paddies to soak unwary legs to the thigh, chills, fever, worsened by wet or cold lying, peril to a hardy woman. Let alone a physically fragile man.

  Tellurith sets her glass down with a snap that fetches both Shia and Verrith. “No, nothing. I’m quite all right.”

  Just thinking like a blighted nursemaid about an outland dangle who took your House defenses on and beat them, who dared you to a gamble that, if he runs the Kora the way he did the City wards, he is horrendously sure to win.

  And where is your City then?

  In the meantime, thinking won’t find him, or put a roof over him. Tellurith gets up. Goes with a steady step to the little dispensary. Pours a measure of sleep-syrup and puts herself to bed.

  * * * *

  Winter evening on Amberlight, drenched streets glistening, Arcis’ summit walls cut black on sanguine cloud-sags between processional showers. In the Telluir House-head’s vehicle, the driver peers, the handler mutters, stroking contacts, so stored sun-power throbs back into the wheels and the machine weaves, its lamps checkering streaks of shadow amid the homing feet. While Tellurith, hunched behind them, bites her lips against a shriek of, Run them down and be damned!

  “We have permission,” Zuri beside her, cool as aged oak, “to hold the bridge.”

  Unanswered, she adds, “They’ll be in Gatehead by the time we’re through.”

  Gatehead, first village on the main Kora road, which runs all but arrow straight for thirty miles between a Diaman and a Telluir holding, its villages and inns dotting the boundary line.

  Hill-foot Road opens, a yawning gap of dark warehouses, glittering wet stone. The vehicle surges forward. Tellurith stares blindly into the dusk.

  At images from the report, sightings passed by mirror signal across the roused countryside, tracing a ragged zigzag, north-west into Diaman country and back. Clothes stolen at a farm-house, a beggar with a suspicious story, an attempt to lift a horse. Thwarted by a watchful farmwife and a pair of lively dogs. A ragged, tiring fugitive, her imagination constructs, hunted too hard for guile.

  And a rowdy crowd of shepherds alerted for intruders, wandering back from an inn to their tents by a traveling flock. Startled to uproarious custody when the notorious invader walks out in front of them, showing empty hands.

  Worse than accounts of the capture, superfluous beating, cart­ing inn-ward slung like a hunting prize, from a pole, harder than the almost unbearable thought of renewed internal damage, that first picture niggles in her mind. Grim resistance, desperately sub­tle trickery, a struggle to the perhaps literal death. Any of that she has expected. But surrender?

  Anything but that.

  At long, long last, the wet dusk horizon rises, and a square door frames the lurid west: Dead Dyke wall. Gate-watch waving them past. Tellurith sits up and growls, “Can we get a move on now?”

  The inn-keeper and unofficial posse, cloddish jubilation only partly cowed by sight of an actual House-head, escort her upstairs. One look at the trussed body, muddy rags still drenched, face worse battered than on Exchange Square, one touch on the frigid cheek and Korites go flying, impelled by a Headly roar.

  “Get my people up!”

  Iatha and Zuri help heave him down with their own hands. Say nothing when their Head climbs in the back compartment, deg­radation unthinkable, clutching a filthy outland prisoner’s head in her lap, snapping, “Get us home! Go!”

  He is still catatonic when they settle him on the infirmary table. A stupor balanced by Caitha’s outcry as she cuts ropes and strips rags and descants on her work’s undoing.

  “Exposure—shock—battering—sweet Mother, look at that!—Did they have to use an ox-goad? . . . Rope-galls—blisters—did he run barefoot as well? Starvation—Mother’s love, was there anything he missed?”

  With an undertone of panic as stripped clothes and warm water reveal the damage; which surfaces, at the fresh blood on his thighs, on a moaning intake of breath.

  Oh no, Tellurith’s heart groans with her. Oh, no.

  Caitha steadies herself. Snaps, “We have to look.”

  But when they pull his legs apart the stupor proves genuine. Not coma but withdrawn awareness that explodes in thrashing, struggling panic to the most harrowing wound-sounds of all. A full-grown man with every shred of control gone, screaming at the top of his lungs.

  “Hold him!” Caitha bawls as five solid women fight to keep their grips. “Got to look. Get restraints!”

  Panting, nursing stressed wrists, Tellurith eyes her fellow arm-holder’s sprung thumb, Zuri’s grazed cheek. Looks aside and loses composure. “Mother aid, can’t you make him stop!”

  “Take longer to get syrup down him.” Caitha is wild-eyed too. “Get it over with!”

  She does it, teeth clenched against struggles that even Tellurith’s voice, touch, cannot calm. Examination; thankful notice of minor damage. Dressing. “And now . . .”

  “We turn him over.” At the timbre of their Head’s voice, Zuri and Iatha roll their eyes. “Get some clothes on him. Into a bed!”

  Easier said than done, with three other patients in the infirmary and a man whose terror is still running amok. By the time they wrestle him under sheets behind the makeshift screen, all Tellurith’s feelings have transmuted to red, illogical rage.

  “If he won’t hold still, tie him down!”

  When they buckle the restraints and he is still struggling, the fury bursts. “Rot you,” she bawls, “wake up!” And slaps him across the mouth.

  The sound reverberates through the infirmary. Nine women, suddenly quieter than mice. One man, staring with eyes whose space-black oceans obliterate his pinched, bloodless face.

  “Do you know me now?”

  The eyes get bigger. The fine-cut mouth, misshapen by blows, approximates a soundless, “Yes.”

  “Bring the sleep-syrup,” orders Tellurith.

  “No!”

  He screams then. And keeps screaming, until fatigue and desperate worry and concern she does not want to consider go beyond rage to viciousness.

  “Fetch,” says Tellurith icily, “a gag.”

  Zuri and Iatha go more than quiet. Caitha, eyes larger than saucers, does what she is told.

  And when the gag muffles but does not silence him, Tellurith says in a voice icier than the wind outside, “He’s upsetting the pa­tients. Take him where he belongs. The tower.”

  The noise stops as if cut. Zuri’s troublecrew, already stooping to the bed ends, straighten up.

  Terror, more than terror in those eyes now. But if ever eyes could speak, those do. Frantic, wordless lucidity. Imploring, beseeching, more eloquent than prayer.

  Tellurith stands and stares. Stupid rage draining out of her. Time to remember now, the nightmares she envisaged. That her first emotion, at news of that capture, was stomach-turning relief.

  That after all, he is not smashed. Not dead.

  And not, now, insane.

  And should not, that proud enemy, be reduced to this.

  She
says, more than roughly, “You rotted—idiot.”

  His body collapses. Tension breaking like a branch.

  “I should beat you to a jelly.”

  His breath catches and goes out, a long, easing subsidence. The head rolls sidelong. Behind the gag, the bruises, his features relax.

  “I ought to lock you in the tower. And feed you bread and water for the next six months.”

  The lashes flutter, settling, on his gaunt, stubbled cheek.

  “If we take that gag off, are you going to keep quiet?”

  Fervently, he nods.

  Tellurith’s fingers move. Undoing the tapes. Easing the cloth away. Blood and saliva splatters, a pang at the sight. Another at the stubble-blackened, battered mouth. “You are an idiot.”

  The head nods, eyes not opening. Yes.

  “Zuri, what do we need with all these people?” Tellurith comes to reality with a jerk. “Leave me Azo. For everyone else—my thanks.”

  Zuri will see them made palpable. As the noise ebbs, Caitha mutters, “Hot liquids. Soup . . .” and vanishes to summon her own underlings. Only Iatha, quiet in the corner, remains.

  Tellurith puts a finger on the webbing across his chest.

  “If we undo these, there’ll be no more nonsense? No fighting? No getting out of bed?”

  A long sigh. Another nod.

  “No more,” her voice goes sterner, “running away?”

  The eyes open, ink and ebony, alive now, too aware. Tellurith holds them, answering, Yes. You know exactly what I mean.

  “I want to hear it. No more running away?”

  The lids sink. The swollen mouth tightens. Resistance, aware­ness, surrender’s last, painful relinquishment.

  And then, barely audible, “No.”

  Tellurith feeds him the soup. Aware, too aware, of the weight of shoulders against her, his head on her arm. Heavier now in a dif­ferent surrender. Knowing, feeling himself safe. A heavier weight than flesh ever had. Her commitment. Her obligation.

  Her trust.