Amberlight

by Sylvia Kelso

  * * * *

  “Yes,” says Caitha, mildly puzzled, “he can stay in bed up there as easily—more easily than here. They can carry him up.”

  And with her prize ensconced in his former room, Azo on watch, a wary Shia preparing more soup, time till the midday break allotted, in the book, Tellurith sits down again on the bed-side. And demands, “Why?”

  The lifted eyelids, the reproachful expression answer, Must I spell it out? The mouth, lips scabbed and purple today, says painfully, “I just—couldn’t stand—to be stuck here—”

  “I can guess why you ran. Why did you stop?”

  He averts his head. Shuts his eyes.

  “I thought,” Tellurith says very quietly, “we would have to hunt you down to the last step. Maybe shoot you, in the end. I thought you would—get through.”

  And this interrogator’s commerce still functions. For his shoulders heave. He pulls his arm up. Speaks across it, finally, muffled, another, far harder surrender, only manageable from behind this barricade.

  “There was— In the end . . . there was nowhere to go.”

  Shia brings the eternal soup and clears it away, while Tellurith chews on that. Nowhere to go. No restoration of memory. No way to re-thread the maze of whatever, whosever intrigue brought him here. But enough remembrance to know it would be fatal, if his choice was a mistake.

  Enough remembrance, and a high enough stake, for that proud, that fearfully resourceful, formidably subtle male personality to choose surrender instead.

  Tellurith gets off the bed. As Azo comes, silent-footed, she says, “Let Caitha know. As soon as she judges her patient fit to reach the shaper’s wing, tell Hanni, last morning appointment, and noon-break after. In the book.”

  * * * *

  “Were you born in this house?”

  “Eh?”

  The first evening he has been allowed up. Heavy snow on the Iskans yesterday, and a freight-carrier collision on frosted streets this morning that has given Tellurith leverage to postpone meeting the Thirteen. Dinner over, the convalescent chafing at more soup and salmon mousse, he has stretched himself on the rug. Conveniently distant for Tellurith to forget present reality, in brooding about its repercussions elsewhere.

  “Were you born in this House?”

  Laid out on his belly beside the heating vent like a drowsy boy. But no boy’s idleness ever used those eyes.

  Born here? “Yes.” And the birth-cord never snapped.

  Silence. Warily, Tellurith lets it stretch.

  “How old are you?”

  “How old are you?”

  The parry is sheer reflex. But he frowns, considering.

  “I’ve no idea. What comes to mind . . . is forty-three.”

  Tellurith adds quantities of body hair to weathered skin, subtracts boyish slightness, tops with that personality. Says with conviction, “Probably right.”

  Silence. Black eyes waiting, deep as lakes.

  “By Amberlight count . . . I’m thirty-nine.”

  “Amberlight count?”

  “Thirteen months and a dark to the year. We go by the moon.”

  Silence. Thought-chain destroyed, Tellurith is all too conscious of his presence. Impelled to take charge. “Do you remember family?”

  A long pause. “I think . . . brothers. A feeling of soldiers—I think we moved a lot. I can see barracks . . . stone barracks. It feels like more than one.”

  “Our speech-assayer,” she drops it, carefully casual, commerce returned, “thought you might have grown up in Verrain.”

  “Speech . . . !” Then, easing the startled breath into recovery. “You really did try everything. And your family?”

  “I was an only girl.”

  “Are your parents . . .”

  “My mother died—fifteen years ago.” Seconding another novice cutter, when more than the ceiling came down. “My father . . . I see sometimes.”

  A slow, wary frown.

  “In the tower?”

  In Diaman tower. Glue for an old, a fading alliance. Tellurith nods. No point now in mentioning that.

  The silence this time brings Shia in to clear away the after-dinner wine. Tellurith’s chair pinches. She has tensed to move when it comes at last.

  “Are you married?”

  Carefully expressionless, Tellurith answers, “Yes.”

  He sits up, startled. Then the eyes widen. “You mean, he’s in the tower too?”

  Now it is her turn to stare. “Where else would he be?”

  “Well, I thought—these are your apartments—”

  It trails off in a frown. “When you said separate quarters, I never thought you meant husbands as well.”

  “It’s only reasonable. His other wives want to see him some­times.”

  His jaw drops. At the splutter, she cannot control her grin.

  “Didn’t they tell you that about Amberlight?”

  “They—if they did, I lost it.” He shoves hair back, grappling the shock. “God’s eyes . . . how many does he—have?”

  “We’re a quincunx. Five. All in Telluir House.”

  He gulps. And thinks.

  “So they aren’t always in the one House.”

  “As often as possible.” Especially for a House’s head. “Otherwise, most often with a close-linked clan.”

  And don’t ask how often I see him, or how often I’ve thought about him in the last three weeks.

  “What about you?”

  The silence is sinewed, abruptly, with old scars.

  “I think—I was.”

  “Was?”

  Too tightly, “Not now.”

  “Children?”

  “No.” Far too sharply. “You?”

  “Not,” says Tellurith bleakly, “now.”

  Silence. She is acutely conscious of his presence, the slight, lithe shape, the easy posture, one leg tucked under him, elbow on the lifted knee. Sharp-cut profile, against the pearl-flowers of the qherrique.

  “Is ’Rith your name?”

  “Eh?”

  “The others call you Ruand. Is ’Rith your name?”

  “Ruand means, House-head. My name,” precisely, “is Tellurith.”

  Silence. Then, “Except to her.”

  “Except to Iatha. Yes.”

  Except to the House-steward, second-in-command, right-hand and alternate personality. Equal in experience as in Craft. Equal once, as partners, in love, in bed. Before the demands of family, of heirs and marriage-ties, drew them inexorably apart.

  The silence deepens. Wind breathes beyond the frosted glass.

  Very quietly, he says, “What’s mine?”

  Involuntarily Tellurith swings about. Stares into jet-black depths and pulls her vision back, to the thin marred face under its falling shadow-wing, to the expression that says he understands, understands the whole significance of what he has said.

  And before she has time to hesitate, the qherrique, Amberlight, speaks through her. She says, “Alkhes.”

  Masculine version of Alkho, name and moon-phase and cutter’s, House’s, Amberlight’s most sacred moment. The Dark. Moon-phase. The height of Crafter’s hearing. High tide of woman’s blood.

  “Alkhes?”

  “The Dark One.”

  The eyes are startled. Dryly, he says, “That’s very good.”

  And Tellurith sits staring, her blood still roaring in its arteries, thinking, stunned, He doesn’t feel it. He thinks it’s just a pun, on his looks, on his forgetting. He doesn’t understand what it means, to a woman, in Amberlight, around qherrique.

  He doesn’t know.

  * * * *

  “I assure the Thirteen, that when Telluir does find out, you will be the first to hear. In the meantime, there’s nothing any of you can do that we can’t improve. He w
as quite badly mauled in the Kora. It’s more than bruises and wounds. There is absolutely no point in hauling him off, at the cost of superfluous distress and possibly a breakdown, to ask the same questions somewhere else.”

  “Except,” Maeran’s drawl is icy, “that the Thirteen speak for the City. And this is a threat to Amberlight.”

  “Is Telluir less a part of the City than Vannish?”

  “Has Telluir behaved like a part of the City? Capture an outlander, a probably dangerous outlander, lose and reclaim him and now make wide and wonderful assertions when none of us have so much as laid eyes on the man?”

  “If he was good enough to slip Telluir we must be careful!” Falla of Khuss weighs in, always quick to fright. “If he’d got away—if he’d reached Cataract—”

  “He wasn’t captured,” Tellurith snaps. “He gave himself up.”

  “Because,” she overrides the tumult, “he couldn’t remember where he was supposed to go.”

  Slitted eyes. Then Zhee’s slow, silvery tone. “You mean he knows it was too dangerous to mistake—going back?”

  Time for the gamble again. Unavoidable, perilous. Tellurith meets Zhee’s eyes. “That’s what I believe.”

  Liony of Zanza and Sevitha of Iuras and several more burst into gabble. Tellurith’s mind focuses on three. Zhee, immobile as a pile of sentient washing. Jura, scowling uncomfortably. Maeran’s final-stab smile.

  “If it is as serious as that, I suggest—I urge—he pass to the Thirteen’s questioners. That we use serif—or any other persuasion needed—to restore this—his memory.”

  “No!”

  “No?” The pause, the purr deepening. “Can Telluir House possibly have some stake—some other stake . . .”

  “And can Vannish House possibly—possibly—want Dinda or the Emperor on their doorstep, asking how we came to torture, mutilate, perhaps murder a valued agent, a highly paid mercenary—maybe an Imperial officer?”

  Liony of Zanza yelps, Diaman’s Kuro lets out an aged, undignified squeak. Rolling a cool eye on them, Tellurith amplifies.

  “Once, when he was drugged, he saluted—like an Imperial guard.”

  Consternation. Maeran’s steel gaze overriding it. Into the first gap, she drawls, “The more reason to put the matter from the hands of one House into that of the Thirteen.”

  “The more reason,” Tellurith lets her temper snap, “to leave a rotted fragile dangle where he just might recover enough to tell us something—before it’s too late!”

  And as always, when self-contained Telluir breaks, the earthquake is irresistible.

  * * * *

  “Yes, Ruand.” She can feel Caitha’s puzzlement. “He should be able to walk to the Shaper’s wing. Tomorrow, or possibly today.”

  An easy walk for Tellurith, made every other day of her adult life: three floors down in the house, across the court, aswirl today with another ferocious southerly, the shapely flagstones strewn with leaves of fern. Athwart the shadow of the men’s tower, coat gripped tight. Into the throat-catching scent of women’s sweat and emery dust, countless cups of mint or cinnamon tea, long hours yarning. Or solitary contemplation. Or communion, in the heart’s quiet, with the waiting piece. And the under-scent, ubiquitous, unforgettable. Worked qherrique.

  The battered leather curtain swings behind them and she draws a long, easing breath. Remembers, and tallies with compunction the whitened lips and shaky limbs beside her, under wind-tangled hair the familiar beads of sweat.

  “We always hurry when it’s cold. Here . . .”

  He resists a move against the wall. On his feet he is her height, which is not over-tall for Amberlight. Slighter, though, and whippy as a dueling sword. Or, a pang of imagination tells her, that was what he must have moved like once.

  “I can stand up.”

  “So I see.” She restrains tartness, with Verrith and Azo at their backs. “Get your breath before you try to walk.”

  The passage walls probably had color, before they were dusted by years, centuries of qherrique. Crafters’ coats and cloaks festoon the pearl-grime, on age-blackened bronze hooks. The twilight ahead opens on a silver glow.

  “The common-room.” Unwashed cups, to-be-mended tools on the benches, their wood blackened by countless hands. A window on the garden, vista of pruned roses, a great green plunge of tree. A tunnel of striped, pearl-silver, pearl-grey light.

  Short of the first door Tellurith checks. Raises her voice. “In the Work-mother’s name.”

  A growl answers, “Come on.”

  As always, Ahio’s back is to the door. Hunched over the bench, where the paraboloid mirrors focus their twin beams from the boss of qherrique glaring overhead. The paraphernalia of a work-shop fills the small square room whose heat grilles are the only vent. And the glow haloes her short, stocky body, throwing shadows from the tool-stands and worker’s stool, flowing outward from the work-bench like the full of an earth-bound moon.

  When he has had time to look but not to analyze, Tellurith says, “S’hur.”

  Ahio turns around.

  Her left cheek, the left side of her head is seared by a broad white band of scar. A diamond stud, Crafter’s defiance and honor and bravado, sparks in what is left of her ear.

  In her low, grumbling voice, she says, “I ducked.”

  Do him justice, Tellurith decides. He must know what he is seeing. What no man of Amberlight, let be any Outlander, has ever seen. The workroom of an Amberlight House. The process nobody on the River has ever watched. But for all her probing intent, there is no sign of a flinch.

  And he has the wit—the presence, the upbringing—not to move forward. Not to burst out in questions or sympathy. It is respect, as much as analysis, that informs the black, cool gaze.

  Before he looks round to her. Raising a brow that asks, Closer? And when she nods to Ahio, her room, her work, he says, the perfect blend of respect and self-respect, “May I—”

  Ahio’s cheek muscles twitch. They all know he can, or he would not be here. But it is good manners, the respect.

  “Stand here.”

  Tellurith comes to her other shoulder. The piece is just waning out of contact, brilliant pearl cooling to pre-dawn frost. The statuette is half roughed, the wide base and suggestion of skirt, the triangle of raised arms supporting the clumsy block that will provide the helical shafts of the thunderbolts. Ahio’s shaper lies beside it, that no other soul will touch, until it goes with her to the pyre.

  She can feel his body tense, read awareness of his fortune in every faint shift of jaw, cheek, flexing mouth. And follow the turn of his eyes.

  “Is that what you use—”

  Ahio palms the control-box, monumental, calm and knowing as her Head. “That’s mine.”

  Protest is a swift, graceful swing of the head to Tellurith. Who says, “I said I would show you why qherrique is dangerous.”

  He knows quite well what a thin wire he walks. They are very long lashes, she notes, as well as sable-black. Politely, he turns his attention to the statuette.

  Ahio surveys him, with an indulgence that says, Pretty, in her own turn. Glances at Tellurith. At her nod, says, “Touch it.”

  “Touch?”

  “Carefully. One finger. Just touch.”

  He looks at Tellurith. At her blankness, extends a hand. A forefinger; thin, nail clipped and clean now, white skin that shows no manual labor’s scar.

  And kicked upward from the qherrique to one uncontrollable yelp, less of pain than surprise.

  “You aren’t House,” says Ahio, calm without smugness or condescension. “Or blood. Or Craft.”

  His hand nurses its wringing fellow. The pain is obliterated in those black eyes’ fire.

  “It won’t work for—it repulses strangers? Gods—!”

  Ahio grins now, and lifts a hand to her scar. “Oh, it’ll bite us as w
ell.”

  This time, he gives her more than respect. “You didn’t—you did it wrongly—what did—what do you do?”

  Ahio flicks an eye at her Head. Sanctioned, says, “Can’t just walk up and take a chisel to qherrique. It has to assent. You have to be in tune with it. And when you are—you have to ask.”

  “Ask—assent—Gods above.” He must have stopped breathing. “You mean it thinks?”

  Ahio grins. Slightly, warily. And makes the honor-sign before she replies. “The Work-mother knows what it does. We just know what works.”

  “Or if you don’t get it exactly right—or if it regrets the assent,” Tellurith murmurs, “what does not.”

  At amazement’s leveled foundation, he can still raise his wits.

  “Can it—is that why the roof fell, in the mine?”

  “Hah.” Ahio applauds, the soft double-clap that is the accolade of Craft. “Got a bright one here.”

  “Mm,” says Tellurith to both of them. “It can go that far.”

  “Gods’ . . . eyes.” Wonder beyond speech. And then the lance of intellect, quick as the lash of qherrique itself.

  “Then how does any ruler get near the stuff?”

  “It has to be tuned. I told you. To the person, in the flesh. Or to something they hold precious. There has to be—assent.”

  “They hold precious . . . So that’s why Antastes parts up his beloved Prince!”

  Black lightning, kingfisher-swift. A thunderbolt of mirth. As Ahio snorts Tellurith releases her own smile, ostensibly to the second point. “That,” she agrees sweetly, “is why, every ninth year, the Emperor makes a hostage of his heir.”

  And as his teeth click in understanding of what he has just done, she takes his arm, inclines her head to Ahio and her piece alike, and wheels him neatly away.

  * * * *

  And having led upstairs at a pace that gags questions, she waits till he is settled across the table, before she says, “What do you know about Dhasdein?”

  The eyes jerk up, ink-black. The white wine jerks, in the half-raised glass.

  Before he sets it down. Shivers softly, the forgotten seals of trust and secrecy torn, if he cannot remember how. But all too aware that, for what he has been ceded, there will be—there must be—a sovereign price.