by Sylvia Kelso
* * * *
Thirty-six hours, an expedition in virtual war-mode to Arcis, an apocalyptic confrontation: Dinda’s contract revoked, Vannish storming out of the meet. Climbing by dusk to the House-head’s apartments, his arm about her shoulders, she can feel him laughing still. “Dinda snaffled, the assassin’s lot checkmated, the Thirteen shut up in their own box! God’s eyes, clythx, now I know what House-head means . . .”
Clythx. Heart. The first endearment he has ever used. Warmer than the pride, the breath of his laughter in her ear. Lost as Azo’s step checks ahead of them and in a flash his left hand shoves her behind him while his right hand palms the throwing knife in his sleeve.
“Who’s there?”
A cobra’s hiss at Azo. Whose response is a more startling shuffle and grunt. And then, “Ah, Ruand—”
Utmost embarrassment. But Tellurith knows already. It is in the scent permeating down the stair. Light, achingly familiar. Flavor of hyacinths.
Tellurith shuts her eyes. Takes her troublecrew carefully by the arm. Puts him aside. Climbs the last five steps.
“So much caution, Tellurith.”
Unforgettable, the lazy fall of that resonant, melodic voice.
“Or should I—nowadays—say, Ruand?”
Azo steps back. Tellurith is too aware that her other guard has not. That he is right behind her, knife ready, poised like a knife himself. She can picture the slight form, coiled. The killer’s face, the unwinking, implacable black stare.
The man at the stair-head shifts weight, throwing a hip out, an exquisite, mannered curve. The qherrique-glow glistens on his torso, perfectly proportioned muscle, a statue in polished bronze. A ringlet cascades over one shoulder, the gold bead at the tip of its thick bronze-brown corkscrew just tapping his watered-silk bronze trousers’ waist. Around one broad biceps is the two-inch gold band that was her betrothal gift. Gold glistens on the shapely, manicured hands, the elegantly posed wrist. Gold powders his collarbones, his nipples, the high smooth forehead above the silk square of House-veil, framed by glossy falls of hair. He is tall and perfect as a god, a god’s presence, a god’s physique.
Everything that a little dark outlander could never be.
The bronze-brown lashes drop. Gold-powdered too. The stare’s aim is too certain. Tellurith forces her dry mouth to speak.
“Sarth.”
“Enchanted.” That exquisite bow, mannered and graceful as a sail’s turn to the wind. “It’s been forever.” She can feel her ribs flinch, the dagger already in. “I hope—I do beg you to excuse my forwardness.” Grace, acid only he can throw. “But you know, such stories. I simply had to see for myself.”
Alkhes moves. With one hand she catches him. Feels, from his stifled flinch, what pressure she must have put on his wrist.
“And this is the paragon in the flesh.”
“Azo.” There is almost composure in her voice. “Open the door. You three wait here.”
Soundless, breathless, Azo obeys. Edges past, to the safety of the stairs. The man at the top offers her a small, ironic courtesy. The man at Tellurith’s back moves with her.
“I said—”
“I’m coming with you.”
Argument? Worse display, worse humiliation. And nothing short of brute force, she can tell, will make him stop.
Tellurith gestures to the door.
Sarth turns, poetry in motion, upon her most precious rug. The backdrop glamorizes, the qherrique caresses him. Tellurith stands frozen. Hideously conscious of the human catapult at her back.
Accented topaz eyes smile. “I’m told he actually took a poison dart for you. Saved your life.”
Easier to accept what is coming. Tellurith merely nods.
“I hear,” the superbly shaped brows move, the slightest, most elegant curve, “that he shares the apartment. Too.”
Her heart-beat has accelerated. Too much experience. She keeps her voice steady. “Politics.”
“And what would I know of that?” Mellifluous dagger in the mourning cadence. “But to share everything?”
She does not feel the other’s move. Is just in time to catch and jerk as the knife comes up on the soft, lethal hiss.
“Are you suggesting . . .”
“Dear Mother, is he threatening me, Tellurith?”
Grip, wrench and jerk. Use—misuse the fury, with anguish in the twist. “Stay out of this!”
“Gods damn it, Tel—!”
“Stay out!”
“Such violence.”
Unbroken, Sarth’s languid, deploring posture. That says, clear as burning acid, Such a barbarian. So uncouth. “But then, I’m sure he has some attractive points.”
Tellurith looks at them both, and that something squeezes her heart. At Sarth, tall, splendid, elegant, perfectly tended and proportioned, all an Amberlight woman could ask. At her small untidy death-adder, outland, potential traitor, skilled only in death.
Brilliant teeth gleam. “For instance, I hear the strangest stories from Herar—”
“Shut up!”
Sarth recoils, miming fear. “Oh, Tellurith, I do implore you. You know I’m not trained in—martial arts.”
Alkhes all but spits. Under the House-veil, those lips shape a smile. Then face, hands, body modulate into grief.
“But perhaps, that is better. After all—I could only give you sons.”
No, is all she can think, as the pain drowns her. For her wound, for his wound, for his damnable poisonous skills that can turn his hurt to a double stab in her defenseless heart.
“That’s enough.”
It comes over her shoulder, a single murderous hiss. Sarth recoils in earnest. Death stalks him across the rug, knife-blade glittering, circling, forcing him inexorably toward the door.
“Tellurith—”
“Shut up.”
“Have you ceded even authority, Tellurith?”
At that his hunter stops. Poises, half-turned.
After all, the last blow must be hers. A House-head’s authority—she feels the bubble of hysteria in her throat—even for a slighted husband, cannot be overthrown.
“I know what I am to you, Tellurith.” How can such gentle, poignantly pronounced words give such a two-edged cut? “But I thought—I did think—you might have told me yourself.”
“Get out!”
* * * *
New moon fine as a sickle’s ghost over Amberlight, pure, remote in a black and lilac sky. Swimming, wavering, through the glass pane. Through the unstaunchable tears.
On her nape, the merest breath. Hands taking her arms, cupping her shoulders, delicately as fractured glass. The warmth of his body, its familiar shape against her, is a sentient wall. Against her neck, she feels his head bowed. The feather touch of lips.
And presently she can raise hands to her own face. Breath by breath, sob by sob, begin to cry.
When it finally eases, he folds his arms about her. With her hands resting over his, says it very quietly into her ear.
“I didn’t mean to usurp—your choice.”
Tellurith moves her head. It doesn’t matter. Not now.
“Gods damn . . .”
A soft, passionless, lava river of obscenity. “Gods rot and strangle the bastard. Tel, if I’d known—if I’d only thought . . .”
Her throat is blocked, impassable. She moves her head again. Don’t. There was nothing you could help.
“Just tell me, clythx. Is there anything—anything—I can do?”
New moon over Amberlight, pure and passionless and clean. A renewed world. A fresh beginning. If life were only like the moon.
She turns about in his hold. Takes his shoulders, stares into the wide, intent eyes.
“You want to do something for me?” It comes out choked but fierce. “Really do something? Then give me a daughter, Alkh
es.”
She hears his breath stop. Then he lifts his hands to hers. Draws her gently from the window, the night, the watching moon.
And speaks more huskily than she did. “I’ll try, clythx. I give you my word, I’ll try.”
* * * *
But it is death he gives her first. Iatha’s nightmare, a River Quarter ambush, half a warehouse wall dropped across the street in early dark, the vehicle immobilized by rolled-in rocks, a torrent of bludgeons and bodies and screaming alien faces flung on every door.
Behind which Zuri and her gadfly’s providence have increased the escort to four, and before the return trip began his wary nerves have had the light-guns out and charged. So the first breached window brings the horizontal thunderbolts of their riposte.
Two hours later, detour made, House reached, bath and dinner over, Tellurith is still shaking. Mind replaying and replaying the appalled, the seared, melting, fleeing, falling figures, bodies, faces. Upturned in the gutter under her feet. Nose, face, center of the head burned clear away. A disconnected hand. A scarecrow dragging a hamstrung leg. The hideous, hideous screams. The more hideous stench. Excrement, incinerated meat. Amberlight’s unique weapons. Turned, for the first time, upon Amberlight flesh.
A silent step. Silent presence, settling at her back. Over the cushion, a tentative, question of a caress.
Tellurith turns round. Takes him passionately, desperately about the neck.
When her shaking finally stops, he says, “I’m sorry, Tel.”
“Sorry?” It makes no sense.
“It shouldn’t have been so messy. There shouldn’t have been so much . . . If I’d had a gun I could have dropped the first one who rolled a rock in, and that would have been it.”
She is some time understanding. That for all his concern, all his tenderness, the killer has gone on thinking. The reasoning of death has never stopped.
Tellurith shuts her eyes. Tells the invading faces, You chose to reject the one with gentle arts. You can thank only yourself.
She opens her eyes and says, “It’s not your fault.”
“It is and it’s not.” Anger burns, deep in the quiet. “If I hadn’t thought—the way I do—we wouldn’t have had the extra guns. We wouldn’t have been ready. They’d still be alive.”
A pause.
“And we’d be dead.”
Tellurith re-opens her eyes and stares past his shoulder, beyond the deserted table, to the walls’ glowing labyrinth.
“It doesn’t seem,” she cannot hide the miserable laughter, “much of a choice.”
“Well, damn it, there should have been! There would have been, if I could handle a light-gun . . .” A catching pause. A breath, and plunge. “Tel, let me try to use the qherrique.”
Tellurith does not scream. Does not swear. Does not shout and throw things. In a moment, actually finds a haunted, turning-worm perversity that says, Very well. Let him see for himself.
“Put your hand on top of mine. Fingers loose.” Slight, warm, hard fingers, calluses Sarth’s hands never wore. “Now . . . I don’t know how to describe it. Empty your mind. Be—receptive. The cutters call it opening the ear.”
And to her startlement, he nods at once. “Like getting ready for unarmed combat. Yes.”
The last thing she expected is that the skill should come from learning to fight.
Against her shoulder his breathing slows. The slight, hard, familiar body quiets. She can feel tranquility, palpable as at the face.
“Move with me.”
Outstretch the hand, fingers bent loosely, his resting over it. Approach that moonrise tracery. Tellurith hears herself begin to hum. The verbal rapport no one ever plans. No one ever omits.
Assent is in her mind, light and palpable as a butterfly’s landing. She lets her fingertips touch.
Warmth and expectation under them, tangible as a pulse. Sliding fingers sidelong, a brush that is also caress. Adjusting the angle, so his hand connects.
She feels the shudder go through him, strong as a lover’s response. Sees the gooseflesh rise like incantation across the back of his wrist.
“Oh, merciful gods . . .”
Her mind incises his profile, sharp nose, ebony sweep of lashes, parted, fine-cut lips. A moment caught in amber as she eases away her hand.
His fingers slide. He has forgotten her. There is more than wonder in his face. There is acolyte’s worship. Enchantment. Awe.
The qherrique glows brilliantly. His hand moves, as if he cannot help it, more in obedience than caress. Tracing the veins out as he does the blue pathways on her breast. Following the threads that turn and twine and part like the currents of the River itself.
Until at last, imperceptibly, the moonrise dulls. Fades, irrevocably, inexorably, away.
His lashes flutter. Against her, she feels the first easing as his muscles begin to relax. Before he can move, breathe, come fully awake, she slides a hand, more roughly than she intends, inside his shirt.
The nipple flicks, erect under her touch. He gasps.
“Tel, what are you—what . . . ?”
“You’re in tune with me.” Her own nipples tingle, she is short of breath. “It’s in tune with us both. It joins us,” her hands slide down. He moans, arching his body into hers. “So it wants . . .”
His hands come over hers, closing them on his body that is now quickened to full arousal. “Oh, gods, Tel.” His heart is thundering against her ear. “I know what it wants.”
* * * *
Tellurith rouses slowly, to an unfamiliar touch. Velvety but hard nap, rasping her ear. No sheets, but a familiar scent and weight over her. Puzzlingly identified as that day’s outdoor coat.
And no sleeping human shape against her, warm and close.
She is naked on the heirloom Verrain rug. Curled like a child, under the protection of that mysterious coat. In the dimmed qherrique light, blurred islands mark her clothes.
And nothing more.
A hammer starts under her throat. Hauling the coat round her, she clambers up.
No one in the bathroom, the corridor. No one in his old room, where he still keeps possessions, unused gear.
No one in her own room. The bed is intact. No sign of a slight, sleeping shape.
The hammer is beating fast enough to block her throat. Below it, ice is creeping through her chest.
No one in the kitchen, the scullery, the washing and store-rooms. No one in the hall. No one in the workroom, its piled desks deserted, desolate.
With one slate, isolate and conspicuous, on her empty chair.
The hammer stops. The ice is already a dagger, a knife opening her belly, before she picks the message up.
So short, so simple. Unmistakable, the angular outland script. Clear as a sentence of death.
Tel,
I’m sorry.
A.
PART II
SUNLIGHT
. . . the hidden paths that run
East of the Moon, West of the Sun.
~ J.R.R. Tolkien, adapted
CHAPTER VI
High noon on Amberlight, glaring, quivering unhindered from the zenith of a leached turquoise sky. Color, coolness, shadows erased. Head foolhardily bare, Tellurith squints out from her balustrade into the mid-summer day.
Windmills swing fitfully in oven-hot westerly breaths. Vertical leaves tremble in the valley beneath, changing the familiar vistas of tower and garden, whose colors pale and deliquesce in the glare. The streets are deserted, heat-haze and sun-stare, all Amberlight panting under the weight of noon.
And beyond the mirror-glitter that loops the city’s perimeter runs another loop. Braided with overlaps and entrances, beaded with standards and sentries’ heads, stapled with palisade stakes, its bare-trampled dykes and massive interleaving earth-banks dirt-brown as the huge scrapes whence th
ey have been torn. Hauled up on a multitude of carts and wheelbarrows and forced-laborers’ baskets, tamped and stamped into this new perimeter loop. This noose. Which cuts off the emerald rice-plots, the golden wheat-harvest, the silver-beige of hayed-off grazing land that recedes into the Kora’s blurry summer heat.
Amberlight is under siege.
* * * *
I’m sorry. A.
Sorry for what? she wonders, as she has wondered endlessly. For running away? With no slip-ups this time, out the main doors on a word to the watch-crew, commandeering a vehicle to the waterfront, a dinghy to reach the Kora, a horse from the first inn. And then? Upstream, downstream, to whichever intriguer’s nest he has flown so unerringly, none of their intelligencers knows.
For her hurt? For the sheer physical pain of losing him, lover and protector-killer, for two months the closest human presence in her life? Shield and sweetness lost, sharing and loving lost, smashed along with her pride, her self-respect.
Her trust.
For the repercussions? For the uproar and recrimination and bitter, bitter in-House, “I told you so’s.” Iatha’s rage and outrage, Shia’s disbelief. Zuri’s humiliation. Did he feel, she wonders, for her and her troublecrews? Who no less, if not so deeply as their House-head, have trusted and been betrayed.
Or was it for the external outrage, yet more acrimonious, Telluir House left to face a Thirteen whose wrath can barely be contained? Censure and revocation of contracts, insult and abuse; and worst of all, from Maeran’s rapier stabs downward, the knowledge that there is no counter. That they are right. That whatever calamity Telluir House has brought on Amberlight is their fault. Her fault.
Or the wider political results? Demands from Verrain. An ultimatum from Cataract. Increasingly undiplomatic correspondence, which within a month issues in an outright threat of war.
Since Telluir House resolutely continues to trumpet the assassination attempt, and enough of the Thirteen have been frightened, bullied or badgered into backing her to hang a deciding vote. No decision being made, the statuette is withheld. If Vannish was behind that blow-dart, Tellurith reflects, they must have long rued the failure of their bluff.
