Amberlight

by Sylvia Kelso

  Tellurith waits, holding his eyes.

  He sighs, driving that hand back through his hair. “Oh, Tel, if I know you so well . . .”

  Then how well do you know me?

  “The mine adits are nearly all down. Keranshah—you know, of course. Hafas. The others are in a mess.”

  He pauses, watching her eyes.

  “Telluir’s is clear.”

  It is very, very quiet in the small fusty room. The heart of the problem. The heart of two human beings. Of Telluir House. Of Amberlight.

  “We haven’t tried to use the guns. We know it blows up, once it’s been shaped. But the raw stuff . . . If you won’t help us work it, let me show them it can be worked. By men.”

  Tellurith does not feel the stool go flying. “You’re out of your mind!”

  “No, Tel.” The eyes are steadier now than leveled steel. “It will accept men. It will answer them. That night you let me touch it. It answered me.”

  She does not know what her face says. All control, all composure is lost in the prickle of rising hair, the ice that scales her spine.

  “It won’t work—!”

  Oh, Tel, the eyes say. Fight me, defy me, wound me. But don’t demean yourself. Don’t lie.

  “Why not?”

  Tellurith takes a great swallow of air, and it sticks like porridge in her throat.

  As the qherrique orders, Don’t speak.

  “It’s just prejudice, Tel. Just class and—and—tradition and—if we have to mine it, at least let’s get rid of this.”

  Tellurith’s hair crawls. And the qherrique orders, Quiet.

  “You don’t have to believe me. You don’t even have to watch. All I want,” very softly, “is your assent. To let us in the mine.”

  Tellurith gapes. Gasps, feeling the mad laughter rise, foul as vomit, in her throat. “You think what I say—! Oh, Mother—!”

  “It’s Telluir’s mine. You’re Telluir House.”

  With a huge effort she forces laughter and nausea away. It comes out, wonderfully, almost steady-voiced.

  “You don’t know—you can’t know—what you’re doing. You’re out of your wits. My—our—the House’s assent has nothing—nothing! to do with it!” Hysteria rises again, a screaming tide. “Alkhes, for the Mother’s sake—don’t go on with this!”

  “Tel—”

  “Please!”

  She stares, appalled, speechless, into appalled, bewildered black eyes.

  “Tel, could you just—”

  “There’s nothing to explain!”

  She can see the eyes shift. From pain and bewilderment to pity, to compassion. Poor woman, the strain has been too much. To that steely resolution, smooth as velvet, impossible to move.

  It seems forever that she stares at him, across a city, an empire, eighteen inches of rug. Before she feels her lungs empty. And the voice of the qherrique, of destiny, says, Enough.

  “Alkhes.” But there is one last effort, one last thing she can do. “If you’re determined . . . For my sake . . . If ever I meant anything to you . . .”

  The face twists, the eyes wince.

  “Then for the Mother’s love . . . don’t do it yourself.”

  The pain turns to startlement. But he has grace enough to let her go, when she reaches the door, yanks it open, sending her es­corts half up the passage wall as she cries, “I’m going back!”

  * * * *

  The preparations take another two days. Within her shell of closed mind, numbed feelings, Tellurith hears the others talk, the buzz on that third morning; a sullen late summer morning, full of boding storm. And a great gathering of soldiery toward Main Quay, a procession of military notables, drums and trumpets blaring, scarlet-hackled rivers flowing along Hill-foot. Brigadiers, Dhasdein and Cataract officers. The tyrant of Cataract.

  I wonder where they quartered him, she thinks, as fraternizers spin word back from the gate: There is to be some major spectacle, some ritual, a symbolic claiming, before the assembled armies’ audience, of Amberlight.

  And of course, the general will take a central role.

  In the depth of their makeshift camp it grows eerily, peculiarly quiet. Tellurith sits in the torn army tent, the only woman in the enclave, perhaps, who is not looking toward Amberlight.

  “What is it, Tellurith?”

  Long ago he would speak to her like that. So concernedly, so tenderly. When she came to him in the tower, galled, as now, by some trouble she could not right.

  Except the shared troubles they could not share.

  She turns about. The topaz eyes hold hers so earnestly, all their glittering malice gone. Lost with the house-veil, the cosmetics, the lovelocks. Shirt and trousers now, hair tied, like any Craftless woman’s, in a tail.

  “Oh, Sarth—”

  But after all, what can she explain?

  “They’re going to do something,” she has to swallow, “up there.”

  The eyes gauge her. Then he flows from a hunkered squat to settle at her side. A shoulder barricading them from Amberlight.

  And at once she must turn about. “They—” But what do explanations matter? “Just stay with me.”

  * * * *

  The environs are silent now. Expectation has quieted even the detainees. Amberlight looms above them, shattered Houses, captive citadel, flying no flag of any nation, marred suburbs below.

  And between, the great luminous bulwarks of the qherrique.

  The pause elongates. Silence has thickened like mist. Even in the camp, tension grips.

  And then every set of eardrums reverberates, blasted, pulverized by the crash. The world-shaking blast, the huge pearl-shot fireball spouting above Canal and Iron Spurs, shooting high over Arcis, the dust-cloud mushrooming out to blot carrion crows from the shaken sky. A staccato torrent of lesser explosions, an undifferentiated crackle and blast of after-shocks. And suddenly Tellurith grabs her husband and flings them both flat, bellowing in a House-head’s roar, “Get down! Shut your eyes!”

  But they pierce closed eyelids as their impacts batter upon stunned, cringing ears. Flash after flash, enormous, blinding, huger than any rogue mine or workshop flare, firebolt after firebolt, white incandescence shearing the murk. Flame after flame. Crash after ear-splitting crash.

  Some of the first impacts strike the siege-wall. Tellurith feels the impact through nerve and skin and bone. Hears, faintly, as the earth quakes, the drowned, abbreviated screams.

  Dead Dyke wall blows outward as if a giant kicked it in the guts. All around them the earth shudders to other impacts, and between blows, now, comes the purr of fire.

  Tellurith gets her head up. Peers, blinded eyes shrinking, toward Amberlight.

  There is no sky, no city, only the immense white-shot pearl-glistered pall of dust, torn ever and again by fresh lightning bolts. The skyline is gone. She sees it go, Iron Spur dissolving like a watered cake. She sees Arcis’ walls sink in the middle and slide majestically, an imploded landslide, into the earth. Sobbing, praying, she watches the death, the final death of Amberlight.

  And in the dust-pall, the writhing clouds form for one moment the lineaments of a face. Wispy white hair’s aureole about folded skin that limns the shape of eyes. Wrinkle-graven cheeks, lipless, infolded mouth.

  A face that speaks to her, cryptic, inexplicable. For what reason, from what source?

  That tells her, as the city dies behind it: Daughter, be blessed.

  * * * *

  Then she is flat as a trampled worm amid the wreckage of Telluir’s shanty camp, with Zuri’s iron arm hauling her upward and Zuri bawling in her ear, “Ruand! Ruand, come on!”

  Perforce Tellurith comes upright, staggering, gasping, “What?”

  Zuri spins her round. Points, all but aims her eyes. A section of pit wall has collapsed. Palisade stakes have cascaded onto t
he landslide’s ramp. Beyond it is writhing smoke, a red leaping fringe wide as a fire-front in the sapless summer Kora: burning tents.

  “They won’t look for hours! They’ll be running like singed dogs!” Zuri’s bawl, Zuri’s hand propels her forward. Troublecrew, Iatha beyond her, looking, staring. Starting, with hardly a snatch at possessions, to run.

  “But what,” Tellurith screams, “for?”

  She has never seen Zuri so nearly burst.

  “Desis! When they caught us! Brought here—she saw the light-gun dump!”

  “What?”

  Zuri fairly screams.

  “The light-guns! The cutters and shapers! Not the vehicles, couldn’t shift them! But they stockpiled the rest—out here! Out of,” a banshee’s delight climbs all but beyond hearing, “harm’s way!”

  Then Tellurith understands. And like so many others in the wave going cross-camp behind her, grabs her husband and runs.

  * * * *

  Guards at the pen, guards at the dump? If any remained, the stampede would have gone clean over them. It flattens the intervening tent-rows, its sheer mass levels the palisade. Into the compound it streams, and the roar that rises then mutes the fire. Tellurith hears her own scream lost among it, as her hands close, greedier than a lover’s, on a cutter grip. Life, mastery, power.

  Qherrique.

  The surge throws a face into hers. Familiarly scarlet, roaring. “Telluir! Come on, Telluir!”

  She goes at first, run on a wrenching arm. Swung about to face the siege-camp’s chaos, leveled tents, tumbled supply heaps, a cauldron of swirled smoke and rampaging fire. And the great dust-tomb of Amberlight beyond.

  Tellurith stops with a jerk. Bawls, as the check spins Damas back round to her, “Where?”

  Damas’ mouthings are lost in the roar. The gesture is clear. There. Home. Amberlight.

  Tellurith opens mouth to yell and charge.

  And stops.

  There is a shell of silence amid the screams, the jubilation, the snoring of the fire. There is a plummeting emptiness, a dizzy strangeness, under her heart. A presence whose presence was never recognized until it is lost.

  The qherrique is gone.

  Against the dust-pall images flow through her. A broken eggshell, dry. A corpse of thistle-bush, plaything of the winds. A snakeskin, sloughed. Rain on a broken house.

  She shakes her head, pierced as at the moment of hearing her mother’s death. Torn open. Bereft.

  Damas hauls and howls. Tellurith does not hear.

  “’Rith? ’Rith?” Familiar hand and voice, home, safety. But not the voice she needs.

  “Ruand?”

  Tellurith holds her belly, a woman wounded in a woman’s core. She will crack like a melon from the loss.

  “Zuri—!”—“What is it?”—“The Ruand—”—“Oh, Mother, is she hurt?”—“Did they hit her?”—“What happened—”—“Oh, not the Ruand, no!”

  Not that voice, no, not a mother’s voice. But in need of a mother’s voice. The voices of the House. A House-head’s child.

  The breath she gulps travels like a lead-stone down her throat. Her ribs seem to burst. And as she chokes, Damas, taking motion for assent, hauls her arm, shouting, “Come on!”

  And Tellurith answers, “No.”

  Her very quiet enforces quiet. In a sudden hurricane eye of silence, the women round them stare.

  “Telluir!” She has never seen Damas so near apoplexy either. “It’s the best chance we’ll ever have! That’s our city! We can throw them out—take it back!”

  “No.”

  Damas erupts. When she collapses, spluttering, Tellurith speaks. Clearly now, to those beyond her folk.

  “That is not my city. That is a corpse. Why should we bother to take it back? What made it is not there. The qherrique is gone.”

  There is a plunging pause so deep the camp around them seems to disappear. Into it one voice rises. The keening, wordless note that opens an Amberlight wake.

  “I am not going back.” She speaks across it. Dry-eyed, womb closed now. She can almost feel the sealing wound. Why go back, after all? For a smashed city, a dead House, a corrupt trade and a foul, cruel custom?

  For a lover who is dead?

  Ahio materializes before her. Eyes slit, the shaper clutched like legend’s treasure in her paw. A new shape, a new world forming in her eyes.

  “Ruand?” Dazzled now. Too like the expression in another pair of eyes, cutting the last thread that has girdled up her heart. “Ruand—where?”

  Tellurith turns about.

  Space, distance, vacancy, lost in sheaves of smoke. Not the hill of Amberlight with its fabulous pearl-moats. Never again. Never again the glow in those black eyes, the sheen of qherrique marbling a night-lit wall.

  But through the brume, the horizon takes an upthrust, shaggy, familiar shape.

  She lifts her arm. The cutter-beam is familiar tension in her wrist.

  “There.”

  Mutely, Telluir House-folk stare.

  “The Iskans,” Tellurith speaks to carry across the assembly, “are where Telluir began.” Ancient tradition, older than Amberlight’s first name. “The Iskans are still ours. They have a stone quarry. There’s always a market for marble. And I was trained,” she shifts her hand, the cutter slits the air, “in cutting stone.”

  * * * *

  Of course it was not that simple, Tellurith thinks dreamily, face upturned to the sailing moon. How much quarrelling arguing tangle afterward between those who wanted to stay and those determined to go? How much maddening, fiddling detail, amassing carts and packs and riding beasts, plundering the plunderers for gear and necessities and supplies? How many days leeway before the shattered remnants of Dhasdein’s army could regain courage and plod back out of Amberlight?

  We had that one day, she tallies, when we sent them yelping in across the bridge.

  There were the Cataract reserves. We shot them down.

  Mother, but I was glad.

  Telluir had most of its gear settled by the second morning. Zuri and Iatha. Once launched, a human avalanche.

  Who decided what we could and couldn’t take?

  I think I did, sometimes.

  And next day, when the dust fell down again, we were ready. To see off Damas, and Ciruil, and that fool Eutharie, still squeaking about rebuilt Houses and the honor of Amberlight.

  Idiots.

  I hope the Dhasdein rag-tag ate them raw.

  Not to think, now, about Dhasdein.

  Mother be thanked, their command—their command structure was broken. So nobody had the control, or the time, or the initiative, to chase after us. Because Mother knows, we’re strung like a traveling fairground along this road.

  And there has been one full day traveling. Five days from—

  Before tonight.

  A fortnight, maybe, to the Iskans, with this crowd. Slap that mosquito. Lucky the Sahandan is dry, there’s somewhere to camp. The Korites seem willing to feed us. We have almost a month left of autumn. Time to settle in, before the snow.

  There is an enormous hole beneath her thoughts. A waiting, ravening vacuum. She cannot look that way. If she thinks about—what she cannot think—the vacuum will rip her soul away. And she will never come back.

  Tellurith turns on the blanket and stares away to the shadow of the Iskan summits, an irregularly penciled horizon fading into the threshold of the sky.

  A step crunches. Warmth settles beside her. A blanket folds about her. A deep, soft voice asks, “Are you cold?”

  Pulling up his blanket, she answers, “Not now.”

  * * * *

  In the daytime, the journey trivia are blessed, blessed occupation, nagging, overfilling the mind. So it holds very little except a need not to shriek aloud if the one-time panel-shaper working this bullock-cart d
oes not admit she can get her beasts across the washout onto this bridge before evening, when Zuri comes pelting, a bundle of rocks astride a Korite pony, down the long, motley, patiently or impatiently halted line.

  “Ruand! Traffic back there!”

  Tellurith’s heart stops. No, she wants to scream, blinded by images of Dhasdein infantry, the mounted poison wasps of Verrain. Not when it was all so good, so easy—no!

  But her mouth gets out, “How many? What? Who?”

  “So far,” Zuri has yanked her beast about, staring back where a light-gun serves as signal flash, “a rider. Only one.”

  “A scout?”

  Zuri employs her light-gun. There is a hiatus. A flicker of answer. Like her House-head, Zuri frowns.

  “They think not.”

  Korite? Straggler? Decoy? She wants to bundle the whole straggling vulnerable line under her coat skirts, to hurl lightnings and trumpet, Let us alone!

  Aloud she says, “Kasra, straighten that thing out. Now. Zuri, double me back there.”

  At the rear, two orphaned apprentices with a hand-cart, they find Desis the former raider staring hawkishly from the fork of a plains hellien. A pair of horses below her. And with them, Verrith and Azo.

  Who greet her outcry with a beady stare, and Zuri with, “Saw her leave.”

  Azo hefting a light-gun, Verrith stolidly stringing a bow.

  Desis is still staring down the road.

  “I think—it’s only one rider.” A pause. “And I think . . . not a Korite. Doesn’t ride right.”

  “One of ours?”

  An interminable pause.

  “I think—I’m almost certain—it’s a man.”

  Azo jerks like a puppet. Verrith goes bluish white. Zuri’s eyes bulge. She swallows. Mutters something that can only be prayer.

  Tellurith does not jump, pale, feel her heart climb out through her eardrums. She has seen mines fall before.

  Nobody at the face, when they did whatever they did to it, had a chance of getting out.

  She says, “Signal, Halt column. Close up. Stand by.”

  * * * *

  It seems forever, there on the wheel-runnelled dusty road amid the stubbly, dried-quag paddies on the brown-pied plain, its edg­es shivering gently in hot afternoon air. Away to the north, far beyond Amberlight, the horizon is dwarfed by the anvil-head of another storm. Its silver and blue-shadowed cloud-sheets rise through three levels, like a mountain, before its summit strata gleam in the zenith light.