by Glenda Larke
Still, there were other times when he thought she was better company than Mica had ever been. She laughed more. She made him laugh. Without his being actively aware of it, she insinuated herself into his waking thoughts and night-time dreams, and the results were pleasant. Just thinking about her stirred his body. He found himself looking forward to her company. He was happier when she was in the room than when she wasn’t. He wanted to touch her but never dared.
One day he told her as much as he could remember about Mica and then asked, “Do you—do you think it would be possible for you to paint him? I mean, a picture where—where he and I meet up again, or something?”
She thought about that. “I don’t know what he looks like,” she said finally. “Even if you were to describe him… No, I’m sorry, Shale; I don’t think it would work. I’ll ask Russet, though.”
He nodded, resigned. He had not really expected anything else.
“You cheated!”
“I did not!”
Shale tilted his head in disbelief. “There were four shells in that hollow. You dropped another in and then transferred them. You could skip the lady’s hollow because of the purple shell, but you had to have five shells, which means the last one had to—”
She started to laugh. She had taught him how to play a board game called Lords and Shells, which involved trying to collect all your opponent’s shells from the many hollows on their side of the carved board and distribute them into your own hollows, using strategy that involved farsighted interpretation of how the game was going to go. They argued long and hard about just how much luck was involved and how much of the outcome was indeed due to planning; sometimes a single game would go on well into the night. It helped to pass the time. No, more than that, it was fun. And it was hard to get angry with Terelle when she tried to get the better of him by cheating. She would look so innocent and wide-eyed, he always knew she must have done something, but sometimes it was hard trying to work out exactly what. That, he decided, was one of the things he liked about her: she was never dull. Her company made the waiting, the necessity of his Reduner disguise and his virtual imprisonment bearable.
The news she relayed from Vato the waterseller and the bazaars was worrying. There was unrest everywhere. Searches and harassment had become a part of life on their level, and people did not like it. When the waterless lived on the sufferance of those above, they kept many secrets. Spot searches and sudden raids had an uncomfortable way of uncovering them. According to Vato, rumour said the red dunes were divided and at war, with one side led by a woman warrior called Vara Redmane, who had once been a sandmaster’s wife. Besides fighting this rebellion against his rule, Davim ran raids into the White Quarter, seized quarried salt and harried the Alabasters.
Terelle frowned over that. “But that’s silly,” she said. “If the ’Basters don’t get any profit from selling salt because the Reduners always steal it first, then they won’t quarry it.”
Shale thought about that before replying. “Davim will force them,” he said finally. “Quarry salt, or die. He intends to rule the north. Just as Taquar aimed to rule the whole of the Scarpen and the Gibber.”
“Taquar did? Using what forces?”
“Reduners, I reckon. Davim’s men. In exchange for water… which I was supposed to supply. Taquar wanted to control the Gibber gem, mineral and resin trade as well as the whole of the Scarpen. Davim wanted control of the north: the Reduners and the Alabasters.” In his anger, his voice deepened. “An evil pact between two evil men.”
“Taquar told you that?”
“In a sort of roundabout way, yes. Only he said it was someone else, not him. Highlord Nealrith or Rainlord Kaneth. And I believed him. Blighted eyes, Terelle, I saw what happened to Wash Drybone Settle, and he could look me straight in the eye and talk about the wickedness of the rogue rainlord, when all the time it was him.”
She sat quietly, watching him. “And now? After Taquar has lost you?”
“Davim may not know that yet. I can only guess what Taquar will do, but knowing him, he will keep it quiet as long as he can, hoping all the while he’ll find me again. He will never give up. Never. There’s no place I’ll ever be safe in Scarcleft.”
“Cloudmaster Granthon and Highlord Nealrith will protect you,” she said softly. “All you have to do is get to them. They need you. The whole of the Quartern needs you.”
Her words didn’t cheer him, but he accepted their truth and prepared himself to accept all they implied about his future.
Both Taquar and Feroze had told Shale that Cloudmaster Granthon had stopped sending regular storms to both the White and the Gibber Quarters, and tendrils of rumour saying the same thing had insinuated themselves into the bazaar gossip. The rumour was confirmed when one of the waterpriests gave an official explanation from the pulpit. Storms were still being sent to the two quarters, he said, whenever possible. Unfortunately, they would not be enough to sustain the present level of population.
Terelle came back from the market with the news. She was tight-lipped, but that only lasted until she saw Shale. “What will happen to all those people?” she raged. “What do they mean, ‘present level of population’?”
Russet entered the room behind her, his arms full of parcels, and he replied before Shale could think of anything to say. “Settles with water saved in cisterns soon be fighting off those with none. Raids, marauders—groves robbed, destroyed. The Gibber be finished. The settles soon be as barren as the plains themselves.” His tone contained a distasteful avidity that sickened Shale.
Terelle’s frown hardened; she couldn’t accept what he said. “Are people really so stupid?” she asked Shale as she sat down at the table and started to unwrap her parcels.
“Don’t waste your water,” Russet said, regarding the beginning of tears in Terelle’s eyes. “They be not worthy of it.”
“My family are Gibber people,” she protested.
The laugh he gave was harsh with sarcasm. “Ye don’t have a drop of Gibber blood, ye silly frip.”
“My father—” she began.
“Ye be already living within your mother before that Gibberman find her. Ye be Watergiver through and through.”
There was a long silence. Then, “It is time you told me who I am, if you really know.”
“Of course I know. Scoured the Quartern looking for your mother. My mistake. I shuffled her likeness into waterpaintings, thinking to bring her to me, not knowing she be dead. I thought she be using her power to resist the power of the painting. I wasted years.” He gave a grunt of frustration. “Your mother foolish, headstrong, wilful, stupid.”
“Who am I?”
Shale stared at Terelle, his eyes widening. Her voice contained a hardness he had never heard before.
“And what do you mean, calling me Watergiver?” Russet shrugged. “Nothing. Name of people, that be all. Just as ye talk of Scarpermen and Gibbermen and Reduner.”
“What people?” Shale asked.
“People of Khromatis. My land.”
“I’ve never heard of it.”
“Khromatis lies on roof of Variega mountains. Beyond your comprehension, Gibberman. Past the Alabaster Whiteout. My home.” He looked at Terelle. “Your home.”
“Why were you looking for my mother? Who is my father? My real father. Does he live?”
“No.”
The word was stark, uncompromising, but she would not be diverted. “His name?”
“Erith.” He spat it out, his voice twisting with unpleasant emotion. “Erith Grey. Name better forgotten. Stole your mother from her people and fled the mountains. Took her because she had power. And he be having none. He be neither waterpainter nor watershifter. An eel-catcher!” His contempt was thick and unpleasant. “No true Watergiver. Peasant from salt marshes of borderlands.”
She stared at him, her face a mask behind which she hid her turmoil. “And you?” she whispered finally. “What are you to me?”
“Kin,” he said at last. “
Trying to be bringing her back. Your mother.”
“You spent so many years looking for her? From—from before my birth until you met me? That was fourteen years!”
“Yes.”
“And now that you know she’s dead?”
“Ye be taking her place, of course.”
She stared. “To do what?”
“When ye ready, I take ye to Khromatis. Soon—”
She scrambled to her feet so suddenly she upturned her chair. “And have I no say in all this? What am I—a shell to be moved from one hollow to another on the board at another’s whim? I’ll go nowhere without knowing a lot more than this, old man.”
With that deliberate rudeness, she turned on her heel, picked up her hat from the peg at the door and left.
“As wilful as her mother,” Russet growled at Shale.
Shale, only too aware that he owed his safety to this man’s sanctuary, could say nothing; he gritted his teeth in his frustration at being unable to speak his mind. The sandblighted old bastard, he thought. In his own way, he’s as evil as Taquar. And I’m damned if I will allow him to do this to Terelle. I will find a way to get her out of this. I must.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Scarpen Quarter
Scarcleft City
Artisman Russet’s room, Level 36
Terelle returned to Russet’s room an hour or so later.
There was nowhere else to go. And as always, when her mind schemed rebellion, her body suffered. She sweated; her stomach cramped.
In one part of her mind and heart she had always known that Russet was not a gentle, kindly old man with an altruistic interest in her wellbeing. She just hadn’t wanted to see the extent of his nastiness and greed, even in the privacy of her thoughts.
She scowled, thinking, That was so childish.
At least she knew her true name now: Terelle Grey. And if Russet was telling the truth, Viviandra’s father, who had sold her to a Reduner caravan, had only been her stepfather. She was glad of that, too.
She shivered slightly. The thought of journeying to a land so far away that no one had even heard of it scared her. Watergivers. Even the name was outlandish, as if they were all gods. Or blasphemous, as if they all thought of themselves as gods. Yet she didn’t know if she was prepared to confront Russet and demand answers, or to give ultimatums. What if he painted a worse future for her? Perhaps he could restrict her still further, tighten his grip on her small freedoms. How would she bear it? It was bad enough as it was. In her heart, she ached to go with Shale. She trusted him. She liked him. When she was with him, she felt content. No, more than that: safe. Happy. When she thought of him walking out of her life, she went cold all over. But how to tear free of Russet when even thinking about it made her feel so ill?
Sunlord help me, how long do I have to spend with that old man? I hate him!
For the next few days, she kept practising her waterpainting skills, including the ability to influence the future.
“We call it shuffling,” Russet said. “Ye shuffle up new picture from base paint, or ye shuffle the future—make it happen.”
She experimented by manipulating things that she hoped were trivial, but the more she trained her hand and her mind, the more she was frightened by the scope of what she was able to do. “If ye be having details, then only two limits to power of waterpainting, Terelle,” Russet said. “Ye can’t shuffle up yourself into a painting. Meaning ye can’t make your own future. Second thing, ye can’t ask impossible—can’t be bringing dead back to life or making someone fly like bird.”
“It wouldn’t be possible for me to ensure that Shale and Mica meet again, would it?” she asked, wanting to be sure she had been right about that.
“Your heart and mind must have picture of Mica, so how? Ye can’t.”
Shale, practising his water skills alongside her, looked away without commenting. His innate disapproval of waterpainting was like a smothering blanket.
Her fear grew. Her sense of rebellion was being slowly snuffed out, spark by spark. It had nothing to do with Shale, everything to do with Russet. And there was nothing she could do to stop it.
As a snuggery madam, Opal considered the girls’ reading of poetry or writing of loving missives to favoured clients to be part of their entertainment value. Consequently, both Terelle and Vivie had been taught to read. However, Terelle had never read the kind of books that Shale had in his possession. A book about Scarcleft and the people who had once ruled the Scarpen. A book on the geography of the Quartern. A book describing plants and animals and gemstones. A book detailing the dynamics of water.
“I never knew reading could be so—so interesting!” she said. “Where did you get them all?”
“I took them from the mother cistern. There were lots of books there when I arrived, children’s books mostly, and Taquar brought me more later.”
“Books in a mother cistern? Why?” she asked.
“What?”
“Why? Why on earth did Taquar keep books at a cistern? And why children’s books? Did he take them there for you?”
He paused, thinking. “No, I don’t think so. Most of them were stacked away and dusty. There were all sorts of odd things there. Toys. Children’s clothes of different sizes, for girls. Women’s clothing, too. As if…”
“As if?”
“As if other people had been living there before me.”
“Children?” She was disbelieving.
He was silent so long she thought he was not going to answer.
Then he said softly, “I’m stupid. I never really thought about it, but of course it wasn’t like that. It was one child, growing up. Getting bigger, older.”
“That doesn’t make sense.”
“Yes, it does. If she was like me.”
She stared at him, not comprehending, and then with growing horror as she did. “A water sensitive,” she said at last. “A potential stormlord. Kidnapped. Living there alone for years? Growing up there? Until she was a woman?”
“A prisoner.” He could barely get the words out. “Taquar’s prisoner. Like me. Maybe she was looked after by a woman. There were no clothes to fit a child older than about ten. Maybe he took her away before she got any older than that.”
“Or maybe she died then.”
He went to rummage through his bag. Russet, who had been brewing more of his paints at the fireplace, looked over at him curiously, but he ignored the old man and held up what he had been looking for: the gold bracelet he had found in the mother cistern. “I found this there. There’s a word on it, but I wasn’t sure what it meant.” He handed it to her.
Before she had time to examine it, Russet had reached over her shoulder and taken it from her. “Vymeth? No, Lyneth.”
“It’s a girl’s name,” Terelle said.
Russet considered. “Familiar. Lyneth. Yes, I remember. Two rainlords lost daughter in desert. Lyneth. Stormlord, folk said. Father be still looking for her, even now. Sandcrazy man with limp. His name? Ianin? Iani, that be it. Husband to Moiqa, Highlord of Qanatend. Their daughter.”
“Not a lost child,” Shale said. “A kidnapped child. She must have died, of illness perhaps. Otherwise he would not have needed me.”
“Taquar maybe killed her if she not stormlord he wanted,” Russet said.
“Maybe she just went crazy,” Terelle whispered. “All those years shut away…”
“Here.” Russet gave the bracelet back to Shale. “Give to Cloudmaster when ye meet.” He sounded more gleeful than touched by the tragedy it represented.
Shale’s expression was one of revulsion. “You would like to see Breccia and Scarcleft fighting one another,” he said. “Why?”
Russet’s face twitched. “I be owing them nothing,” he said. “Asked them for help, all those years ago. Nealrith, Granthon, Taquar, Moiqa, others, too—not one help get me what rightfully mine. Not one.”
“What was it that was rightfully yours?” Shale asked.
But the old man left
the room for the hallway without replying.
“My mother,” Terelle said quietly. “He means my mother. He asked them to help him find her.”
He thought about that and whispered back, “At least we can guess now why he’s helping me. He wants to stir up trouble between the cities. Between Nealrith and Taquar.”
Terelle wanted to argue, wanted to deny it, but she couldn’t bring herself to utter the words. It could have been true. She settled for changing the subject. “If Taquar finds you, but thinks you won’t cooperate, he could have you killed. We heard today that they were conducting a house-to-house search on the other side of our level. And that some of the streets were blocked off.”
“Were they looking for me?”
“I don’t know. Nobody was allowed over there to find out what was going on.”
“Terelle, you need to be careful. Anyone who helps me could be in danger.”
“Let him try to hurt me,” she said, half-amused, half-rattled by the concern in his voice. “He’d have to override waterpainting magic first. You see, Russet has painted me older than I am now.” Her amusement vanished with her next thought. When she had left the snuggery, she had sworn she would be free to do as she wanted. And yet Russet now as good as owned her. She wasn’t even able to think of leaving him.
She, who had so valued her freedom, had lost all the freedom she’d ever had.
Every day after that, enforcers searched a different sector of the level and then carefully screened everyone who entered the searched areas afterwards.
“Only a matter of time before they get here,” Shale said. “And still too soon to be expecting Highlord Nealrith.” It was hard to curb his impatience to be gone.
Russet’s advice was to let them come. “They never be looking for a Reduner,” he said.
“What reason would a Reduner be here, in our room?” Terelle asked. “It would seem so odd to an enforcer, surely. I mean, Reduners don’t mix with Scarcleft folk.”
“Reduner caravanners be selling goods to anyone, just like ’Baster caravanners. Can sell waterpainters red pigment, no?”
