The Last Stormlord

by Glenda Larke

  “Why haven’t you done this before?” she asked. Anything to defer the moment of decision as to whether to acquiesce or not.

  He blinked in surprise at her temerity. “That is none of your business!”

  She stared back.

  He chuckled. “Ah, why not? I wanted Granthon to teach him cloudshifting first. Once he knows how, he is of use to me. And I have heard that Granthon now has help shifting clouds, so I assume Shale is now a stormlord. It is time to get him back.”

  “He won’t take any notice of a letter,” she said, amazed that she sounded so matter-of-fact. The thumping of her heart was painful; the sound of it drummed in her body. Surely he could hear it. “Why should he? I scarcely know him.”

  “We shall see.”

  “Well,” she said, “I hope you don’t really mean it. It is not particularly nice to be told that you are going to be tortured to death. Shale won’t care, but I do.” Bravado. Stupid. It wouldn’t get her anywhere.

  He laughed again. “Not nice? I am not a particularly nice man, Terelle.”

  “Where’s Russet?” she asked. “Did you kill him?”

  He shrugged. “I have no interest in him as long as he lies quiet. My seneschal will kill him if he turns up, though—just to tidy things up.”

  He reached out and touched her cheek with his fingertips. She drew her head back sharply, but the idea of standing up again, of moving out of his reach, died when she saw the look in his eyes. Huckman. It was Huckman all over again. The horror of having her first-night sold. The revulsion and the terror back again.

  He brushed her hair away from her face, sliding his hand down her cheek, outlining her lips with his thumb. This time she did not move, other than letting her eyes fall to the sheet of paper on the desk. When his fingers dropped away—an eternity later—she opened the ink well, dipped in the pen and began to write. As she worked, he stood at her shoulder and played with a lock of her hair. His touch slid up and down, feather light, stroking the strands over his forefinger, turning her hair this way and that so that the rich brown of it was burnished by morning sunlight patching through the latticework. To sit still and not flinch away took all her will; but she had nothing left for resistance. Nothing.

  I’m not brave, she thought. I don’t even know how to begin to be brave.

  And so she wrote the letter exactly as he had asked for it to be written. When she had finished, she handed it to him wordlessly, with a shaking hand. And part of her expected to die violated, there in that room. Against her will, her glance flickered to the bed. Then back to the sword he wore.

  He read the letter through and smiled once more. “Your spelling is original,” he remarked, “but it is a good letter. I like the wobbly writing; it will be good for him to see your fear. We will see if it has the desired result.”

  She shook her head. “I just told you it won’t.” She remained seated, staring at the desktop. “Shale is not a fool, and he doesn’t care about me.”

  “Stand up, Terelle,” he said.

  She did as he asked, without looking at him. She knew she was trembling but was unable to control it.

  “Look at me,” he commanded.

  Reluctantly, she raised her head, to find that if she stared straight ahead, she was gazing at his mouth. When did I get so tall? she asked herself in inane surprise. I don’t remember growing up.

  He put his hands on either side of her face and raised her chin so her gaze met his. “I am not a cruel man, Terelle, only a ruthless one. I get no particular pleasure from hurting others and will not do so unless it brings me profit. I would rather keep you here until you have grown up a little more, to an age when I would find pleasure in your company. When you are old enough to understand your own sensuality.” He bent and kissed her full on the mouth.

  She did not know what to do. She wanted to step away from him, wanted to express her revulsion, but was held in place by terror, by an upbringing that had taught her not to cheek her elders, to be respectful to those in positions of power and to pander to men who came to enjoy favours. One certainly didn’t slap their faces. But when his tongue pressed against her teeth, seeking entry to her mouth, she clenched them hard. He stopped the kiss immediately and stepped back.

  “I—I don’t know what—what you mean,” she faltered. It was a lie; of course she knew what he meant. She had spent seven years of her childhood listening to handmaidens talk of their nights; she had lived another four next to a woman who daily rented out her children as whore and catamite. She knew exactly what he meant.

  “No? Hmm. You will understand soon, I promise you,” he said, releasing her. He folded the letter and tucked it away in his pouch. “I suspect Shale is far too decent to abandon you, my dear. I should not worry too much if I were you.”

  “And what am I to do in the meantime?” she asked, sharpening her fear to asperity with an effort. “Sit here with nothing to do all day while I grow up?” Silently she blessed the obvious: Vivie had not told him her real age.

  “I certainly do not trust you enough to let you loose.”

  “Could you at least let me have my waterpaints? Then I could do some paintings for you, for the palace. It would give me something to do. I am very good, you know.” Watergiver’s heart, I sound like a wheedling brat.

  He laughed outright. “I was correct—you are an extraordinary girl. And I wonder if you are as young as you say you are. I do not think I have been spoken to like this in years, not since Amethyst in her younger days. Very well. I believe everything that was in Russet’s room was brought here. I’ll see if the paints can be located, and I’ll have them brought to you. You can paint to your heart’s content, if it keeps you happy.”

  For a breathless moment the name Amethyst hung in the air between them, then she said woodenly, “Thank you, my lord.”

  He laughed again. “I’ll visit every now and then,” he promised and left her, without taking away the chair and table.

  She collapsed onto her bed and gave way to gasping sobs. Her emotions had been rent and then flung in all directions. There was joy that Shale was safe in Breccia City, fear that he would indeed be idiot enough to take notice of her letter, terror that Taquar would torture her to death or simply kill her “to tidy things up,” tremulous delight that she would have her paints once more and therefore—perhaps—a way of escape.

  And through all that tumult of reaction, she could still feel the slide of his fingers up and down her hair. The taste of him, of his lips, his tongue. The smell of him, of his lust, lingered in her nostrils.

  Taquar was as good as his word.

  That afternoon, Terelle’s waterpaints, together with eight picture trays and some of her personal belongings, were delivered to her prison. When she unpacked, she fingered the mirror Vivie had given her and choked with unexpected emotion. She had not thought about it since she had run out of Russet’s rooms, yet now that she had it back, she felt a wash of tenderness for her sister and for a childhood that no longer existed.

  At the bottom of the bag, there was a scroll of paintings.

  Russet’s portraits of her future, all of them. Taquar’s men had brought her the very paintings that trapped her within Russet’s plans for her life. She had her waterpaints and the possibility of freedom. She had Russet’s painted future for her. Surely there must be something she could do to escape both of the men who sought to command her life.

  It was only later, when she began to think about how to do it, that she realised liberty was not going to be as easy as she had first thought.

  You can’t put yourself into the future, Russet had said. He was right, she found. She did try. She tried to shuffle up a picture of herself standing on the thirty-sixth level—and nothing happened. Nothing at all. Her sharpened image did not appear; the paint did not move. It remained static; it looked lifeless; it felt dead. She could not influence her own future, at least not by projecting herself there.

  What else could she do?

  Kill Taquar.
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  The thought was suddenly there in her head. Paint him dead.

  Picture him lying on the ground with a gaping wound in his chest, lots of blood. Leave his clothes indistinct, but make his face detailed. And then shuffle the future up to make it real.

  Russet had never confirmed that it was possible to kill with waterpainting, but he had not denied it, either, when she had asked. And it would be so easy to try. Would they let her go if Taquar was dead? Possibly. She could save Shale from Taquar’s clutches, for certain.

  But to murder a man, any man?

  She shivered, the icy finality of that thought going right through to her heart. It would be so… cold-blooded. So deliberate.

  I will think about it. She’d have to be very certain before she did something like that.

  She contemplated Russet’s paintings. Maybe she could change her destiny if she altered them, changed the background, for example, or removed all trace of Russet by scraping off the paint or painting over the top? She tried that on one of them but could not shuffle up anything. The shuffling had been done, and the future was fixed, no matter what she did to the paint.

  She thought of altering her appearance, her real appearance. Scarring her face, perhaps. Cutting her hair very short so that she never looked like the woman in the paintings. But when she thought of doing that, the magic asserted itself and her stomach roiled and her hands shook. She would never be able to do it.

  She thought of just destroying them. Tearing them up. Setting fire to them. But what if that killed her, as Russet had said? She remembered Shale had put his foot into the painting of Vato up on the rooftop, ruining it, and Vato had not been hurt. But then, the damage to the painting hadn’t stopped him from climbing up onto the roof, either.

  Besides, she thought, maybe these paintings are all that is keeping me alive right now. If Russet hadn’t painted my older self, maybe the enforcer would have caught up with me and killed me. Or maybe Taquar would have killed me after I wrote that letter. Instead, he was keeping her, apparently for the day when he would regain control of Shale and be able to use her as a hostage, to assure Shale’s good behaviour.

  She sighed, rolled them up and put them away.

  She started on an ordinary waterpainting instead, something she thought Taquar might appreciate: a portrait of himself riding a myriapede, as she had first seen him from the roof of the snuggery, a lifetime ago. She thought she captured the essence of the man well: his pride, his sensual menace, his handsome arrogance, his assurance. The magnificence of his mount. The image was engraved on her mind, down to the last details, so that part was not hard. More difficult was the challenge of eliminating the fear she felt creating his painted image.

  While she worked on the portrait, she pondered what other pictures she could paint to benefit her future.

  Useless just to paint the door to her prison swung open and an empty room beyond. That might mean anything: that she was moved to another part of Scarcleft Hall, for example. She thought about depicting Russet’s room and then shuffling up into that picture something that was now with her—her clothes, perhaps. After all, if her clothes were on the thirty-sixth level, she would be, too, wouldn’t she? Then she thought of other scenarios that might account for her clothes being down in the thirty-sixth—and her imagination supplied a few unpleasant possibilities.

  When she finished the portrait, she left it on the floor next to her dayjar. If Taquar came back before she was ready for him, at least she had something inoffensive to show him.

  On the following day, she prepared a tray with a base of motley. She painted Taquar again, this time lying on roughly depicted ground. Dead eyes stared blankly out of a dead face. A wound in his chest looked as if it might have been caused by a spear that had pierced him and then been roughly wrenched free. Just to make it clear he was dead, she painted a copious amount of spilled blood and portrayed his head lying at an odd angle.

  She stared at it a long time. All she had to do was shuffle it up, and sometime in the future, Taquar would die. But how long would it take? She had no way of knowing.

  And it was so sandblasted horrible to decide to do it. Cold-blooded murder…

  But if I don’t, Shale might be imprisoned once more. I must do this. I must. For him.

  She gripped both sides of the tray. She stared at the paint and connected to the motley, felt the magic, the power within her. Started to ease the water-motley upwards. Thought of the change she wanted to wreak. The death she wanted to make real. The murder.

  And faltered. She lost her hold, lost her concentration, lost her determination.

  She slumped, unnerved. The painting had not moved. It was still ordinary, Taquar’s clothes and the ground still not detailed or real. She was shaking, her forehead beaded with sweat.

  Sunlord help me, she thought. I can’t do it.

  With the picture still unaltered, she hid the tray under her bed. If she was in danger from Taquar, she might want to try shuffling again, might be able to shuffle, so she kept it as surety. She turned her thoughts to other methods of escape, and finally, several days later, she had an idea.

  She painted a picture of a place she knew well: the open hallway outside Russet’s room. Depicting the section of wall between his door and Lilva’s, she captured the detail as she remembered it: the cracks, the crumbling mud-brick, the edge of the bab-wood doors, all seen in the reddish light of dawn. It took her a while to correctly paint the long morning shadow cast by the balustrade, but the perfection of her waterpainter’s memory guided her paint spoon. When she was satisfied that she had everything exactly as it should be, she put the paint tray aside and waited till nightfall.

  Her jailers had supplied her with candles and the means to light them. That night, she spent considerable time moving the desk and candle around, trying to get the best placement for what she wanted: her shadow profiled on the wall. Once she had it just right, she angled Vivie’s mirror so that she could see the shadowed profile. She was struck by a sense of unfamiliarity: it was the silhouette of a mature woman, not of a child. The nose was strong and long, the chin determined, the forehead straight and high. Her bust line was a woman’s; her waist was defined by the swell of a woman’s mature hips.

  She stared, absorbing the details, the proportions, of this person she was beginning to understand. She knew now what Taquar had seen and what he had anticipated. He had seen a mature body; what she had lacked for him was her own knowledge of it. He had held back because he had still seen a child in her gaze, in her directness, and he had not wanted a child in his bed, but a woman. She shuddered in the realisation of the closeness of her escape. She could so easily have become another Amethyst. And somewhere deep inside, she knew that the next time he looked he would see what he wanted. He had awakened the very thing he was seeking, awakened it not by his sensuality but by the fear it engendered.

  She took a deep breath and focused once more on the task at hand. Do the rough sketch of the profiled shadow, a suggestion, a whisper of what is to come. Concentrate on the painting. Feel the motley below. Look once more in the mirror at my shadow on the wall. Attach the paint grains to the water, move the water, shuffle up the image…

  She felt the water shiver in response to the image in her mind; she felt the shift—the rip—in time. She closed her eyes. The nausea, the knowledge that there had been a profound change in fundamental truth. She felt it all.

  She opened her eyes.

  There, on the painting in front of her, was the shadow she had depicted. From the lower body, which threw its dark image across the floor of the hallway, it was impossible to tell who was casting that shadow. But where the shadow hit the wall between the two doors, the profile of a head and torso was undeniably her own. She had not shuffled up herself, but her shadow. She had tricked the magic.

  She allowed herself the beginnings of a smile.

  And that was the moment when she was shaken, as if a giant had twisted the floor beneath her and then kicked the chair
she was sitting on. She crashed over onto her back. Stunned, she lay there, unable to react. Slowly the desk toppled towards her, not pulled by her, but of its own volition, spilling paints and water from her paint tray, splashing her with water and colour.

  She was so shocked, she didn’t even scream.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  Scarpen Quarter

  Breccia City

  Level 3

  When Jasper emerged from the Sun Temple on the third level after the annual Gratitudes ceremony, a person brushed close by him and pressed something into his hand. Startled, he looked to see who it was, but in the mass of people, he could not single out the giver. He was surrounded by a swarm of worshippers from all levels, hemmed in by officials and reeves and guards, pestered by a number of street boys darting in and out to see how close they could get to the rainlords. It could have been any one of them; he had no way of knowing. He looked down at the item he clutched. A letter of some kind. There was no chance to look at it just then, so he shoved it deep into the wrap-over of his ceremonial robe.

  As he glanced around, he felt uncomfortable. Everyone was staring at him, whispering among themselves. He knew why, of course. Granthon had just declared Jasper Bloodstone a stormlord of the Quartern, by grace of the Sunlord and virtue of his proven power to move and break clouds. Praise to the Life Giver of the Quartern, thanks be His name, and all praise to His intermediary, the Holy Watergiver.