by Glenda Larke
"Your second night alone," Ravard whispered in her ear as she stirred a cauldron of food over one of the fires. She didn't react and he walked on.
Her gaze sought Kaneth. Excused by his captors from the chores, perhaps because of his injuries, he sat alone on a rock, looking peaceably at the colors in the sky. No one seemed to care when she strode to his side, not even Ravard.
He looked up when she arrived and greeted her with a simple "Hello."
She greeted him, feeling oddly uncomfortable as she sat down nearby. He looked weary and was, she suspected, in considerable pain. She said, "Have you thought of escaping? Of stealing a pede and riding to one of the other Scarpen cities?"
He blinked in a puzzled way. "Why?"
"Because here we are slaves!"
"Slavery is not allowed."
She curbed her frustration as best she could, striving for an even tone. "The Reduners don't follow our laws. I am a slave. So are you. They are taking us to the dunes. If you want to be free, you must escape." She looked over her shoulder. No one was looking their way. Ravard had his back to them, directing some of the slaves where to put his tent. Never having raised a tent before, they were clumsy and inefficient. Ravard was yelling at them.
Kaneth frowned. "I have a headache. I don't think I can ride anymore tonight. I want to sleep. And nobody's said I am a slave."
She hid her dismay, "The rest of us are, believe me. We Scarpen folk, I mean. Doesn't that worry you?"
His frown deepened, as if he was trying to work through a problem. "Slavery-I thought-I thought there was no more slavery. I don't remember there being slavery." He gazed at the Scarpermen. "That's why they were roped?" The question was as innocent as a child's.
She nodded. "We are all slaves. We folk from the Scarpen Quarter-as you are." When she looked around again, Elmar glared at her and then mouthed the words she had no trouble deciphering. Don't trust him!
Kaneth did not notice. He looked at her, troubled. "The drovers say they know me. That I was born of the dunes, a long time ago…"
"That's not true."
Watergiver's heart, Kaneth. How can you not know who you are? She desperately wanted to jog his memory. She wanted to tell him his name. She wanted to place his hand on her abdomen so that he could feel his son move under his palm…
Instead, hoping that she might be able to stir a memory, she said, "Ravard wants me to share his bed-"
Her heart sank still further as he smiled pleasantly at her. "That's good. He's a handsome man."
Ryka felt as if she'd been stabbed through and through. Speechless, she rose to her feet. He ignored her as he gazed at the sunset and the light fading from the sky.
"What are you wasting your time talking to him for?" Ravard's voice asked from behind her. "You won't get much sense out of him, y'know."
She turned, smiling faintly to hide lacerating pain. "So I discovered. You were right. His head's stuffed with sand."
"Come, have something to eat." He led her toward the campfire, sat her down on one of the many boulders scattering the area and seated himself beside her. She was uncomfortably aware of his proximity. A woman came to push a bowl of food into her hands, and she toyed with it, but ate hardly anything. "Relax," Ravard said. "I don't bite." He nibbled her ear.
"Don't start what's not going to be finished tonight," she told him, keeping her voice low.
He shoveled some food into his mouth. "Don't worry. I don't break promises. But you seem so sad tonight. I shall keep you company. Would it not be good to fall asleep in my arms?" He nuzzled at her cheek. "Nothing more."
"I don't trust you."
"I don't break my promises," he repeated. "And my men expect to see you share my tent."
She glanced around, to see both Elmar and Kaneth watching them. Elmar looked away, frowning; either upset or angry, she wasn't sure which. Kaneth smiled at her gently with benevolent interest, and it was Ryka who looked away.
"It would be good to fall asleep in the arms of someone who loved me," she murmured. "But you do not."
"Never mind. Tonight you can lie next to me and pretend I am your lost husband, the father of your child. Another night after this one to grieve, and then you'll begin a new life on my pallet. You'll start t'be a dunes woman."
Nauseated, she glanced back at Kaneth, but he had already looked away, bestowing that same smile on everyone. It devastated her, that fickle smile.
She had never felt so alone.
CHAPTER NINE
Scarpen Quarter Scarcleft City On his second full day in the hall, Jasper decided to test just how much freedom he had. When he left his room in the morning, the two men on guard outside fell in behind him, marching in step in silence. They followed him to breakfast. Later, they waited outside the stormquest room while he and Taquar cloudshifted. When he went outside to the roof gardens of the hall, two more men fell in step behind. Four of them, discreetly watching everything he did, listening to every conversation he had, even though the only people he spoke to were the gardeners and servants.
After lunch, he left the hall for the streets of the city, and his escort expanded as four of the seneschal's water enforcers joined them. Jasper's previous experience with enforcers had been unpleasant, and these strengthened his mistrust. The men formed a wall around him and gave him the impression they reveled in pushing people on the street out of his way with the shafts of their spears. "Just guarding you," one said with an ill-concealed sneer. "Looking after your security, your safety, your wellbeing, m'lord."
"There's no need to be so rough," Jasper protested, painfully aware of their contempt for outlanders.
"Stormlord," the overman among them replied, "we've been told to make sure no one approaches you. In case of assassination. M'lord."
"Assassination? Who in their right mind is going to assassinate the only stormlord the Quartern has?"
"Reduners might, m'lord."
"And just how many Reduners are there in the streets of Scarcleft? If you see any, you have my permission to protect me. In the meanwhile, my orders to you are to treat the people in the streets with respect."
The man looked at a point somewhere over Jasper's head, his face impassive, and said, "Stormlord, it's the highlord gives us the orders."
"Watch what you say," he snarled. "Taquar is not the Cloudmaster yet. And he won't be until the Council of Rainlords agrees that he is. Is that clear? In the meantime, he may rule this city, but I am a stormlord of the Quartern. I would suggest you don't forget it!"
The man barely hid a smirk. "I serve Lord Taquar." There was a lengthy pause, long enough to be an insult, before he added, "My lord."
Painfully aware that he was friendless in Scarcleft, Jasper narrowed his eyes but said nothing.
"If the stormlord wishes to make a purchase, we can do it on his behalf."
Jasper let the matter ride. It was between him and Taquar, not him and the enforcers. "All right, let's just walk. I want to see the damage done to the city by the earthquake."
"Of course, m'lord."
When he returned to Scarcleft Hall, it was time for the afternoon session of watershifting. When that was over, he headed back to his own rooms, accompanied by a different pair of hall guards. Frustrated, he tackled one of them. He was young and, if his awkward manners were any indication, awed by being assigned to look after the stormlord.
"What's your name?" Jasper asked.
The man shifted his weight from foot to foot, rather like a child in need of an outhouse. "Er, Dibble Hornblend, m'lord."
"Dibble?"
"A nickname, m'lord. My friends think it amusing. A dibble is used for boring holes."
"Your friends think you are boring?"
"I think it was more they thought me good at digging holes for myself. Getting into trouble, that is, m'lord."
"Ah. What are your orders about me, Dibble?"
"To keep you safe, m'lord."
"How?"
In an apparent agony of embarrassment, Dibble grasped his sword h
ilt, then removed his hand, looked at it as if he'd never seen it before, and finally clasped both hands behind his back.
Jasper took pity on him. "Perhaps you should just recite your specific orders."
"To never permit anyone to be alone with you, to prevent the approach of strangers, to be at your shoulder with at least one other guard at all times within the hall, and to have no less than eight guards outside the walls, m'lord."
"Would it be all right if one day I go for a ride in The Skirtings?"
Dibble looked appalled. "Oh! Er… I shouldn't think so, m'lord. You could meet some of those marauding red bastards out there."
Of course, silly question.
"I would like to see the damage done to Scarcleft Hall by the earthquake, Dibble. I understand it was worst around the room where that waterpainter girl was confined. Can you show me the place?"
"No, m'lord. I don't know where it is."
"Could you find out?"
"Of course, my lord."
However, when Jasper asked him about it later on that evening, Dibble looked agonized, finally blurting that the damaged part of the hall was still dangerous, and no one was allowed entry. It sounded logical enough and Jasper might have believed him, except Dibble was a poor liar and blushed red as he said it.
Jasper concealed a sigh. "Very well. Never mind," he said, and retreated to his room. In the middle of the night, after lighting a lantern, Jasper ruffled his hair and flung open his bedroom door, the lantern clutched in his hand and an anxious expression fixed on his face. The two guards on duty outside his room immediately sprang to attention.
"I heard a noise at the shutters," he told them. "Take a look and see if anyone is there, will you?"
They crossed the room, opened the shutters and stepped out onto the balcony. While they were staring into the darkness of the roof garden on the level below, looking for a nonexistent intruder, Jasper formed water from the large jar in the water-room into a human shape, then whisked it out into the passage, out of sight.
"Can't see anything, my lord," one of the guards said a moment later. "Likely a cat, or such."
"Probably." Jasper shrugged. "All right, never mind."
Before either guard moved, he swept the water down the passage past the door. In the dim light cast by a candle lantern outside, it could have been a person. The guards shot out of the room to investigate.
Jasper grinned. He had whisked the water out of sight through one of the passage's unshuttered window slits. When the guards disappeared around the corner, he pulled the water back inside and replaced it in his water-room. He then took advantage of the men's absence to head off in the opposite direction. By the time the guards returned they would find the door firmly shut and Jasper nowhere to be seen. If he was lucky, they would assume the stormlord had returned to bed.
He knew vaguely where he wanted to go. He had asked the odd question, listened to servants and workmen, and from the outside he'd studied the damage to the hall and matched it up with what he knew of the interior. Terelle had done the damage herself; he was sure of that, and it would have been greatest where she was imprisoned-otherwise, how had she escaped? The thought amused him. Taquar had poked a stick into an ants' nest when he imprisoned Terelle the waterpainter, and he'd been bitten.
After one or two false forays into empty bedrooms, he found the room soon enough. As he shone the lantern around, he was surprised to find it looked as if it had not been touched since Terelle left. There was a gap in the outer wall. One of her paint trays was upturned on the floor; the chair and desk lay toppled over; a candle had rolled from its holder. A painting, freed from its tray, had rolled under the dust-blanketed bed, and another was crumpled on the covers.
He righted the desk and put his lantern down. Then he picked up the painting from the bed and gently unrolled it onto the desktop. It was already torn, as if someone had roughly opened it prior to this, but the scene was still recognizable: the entrance to Russet's rooms down on the thirty-sixth level, with the profiled shadow of Terelle herself on the wall. Smiling to himself, he let the painting curl up again. He picked his way over the debris, dust eddying around his feet with every step, to the missing wall, and looked down on the starlit repair work.
Workmen had already cleared most of the tumble of mud bricks and rubble below. New bricks were stacked ready to put in place. He could see the shadowy outline of ladders and bab trunks lashed together as scaffolding.
As he gazed, he tried to imagine what it had been like the day Terelle had looked down on the destruction of the earthquake and risked her life to escape. He thought about her, the turn of her head, the scornful way she would look at him if he said something stupid.
I miss you, he thought. Sandblast, but her absence hurt.
He turned to go, then remembered the second painting sticking out from under the bed. It was a portrait of a woman standing outside a door down on Level Thirty-six. He recognized it; Terelle had shown it to him. She'd said Russet Kermes had painted it to show her the power of waterpainting. He'd told her it was payment for the soul of an artist, payment for her. She'd thought he was mocking her, an unpleasant habit he had, but she'd changed her mind later.
That painting and the way it had changed had been the bait for the trap Russet had laid for her. It had intrigued her and she'd been snared. Jasper sighed and flung it away in distaste.
Just to make sure there was nothing else he'd missed, he knelt to look under the bed. And found another portrait, this one half-dislodged from its now empty tray. It portrayed Taquar lying on the ground, his head at an odd angle like a broken doll. An ugly wound in his chest and an inordinate amount of blood made it clear she had intended to paint the highlord dead.
But Taquar was still alive. Had her magic failed her? Or had she never tried to shuffle it up? He rolled the painting up, remembering her smile, her laugh. I loved her, he thought, and grieved as he tried to come to terms with the knowledge he'd probably never see her again.
"So," said Taquar, "you came here."
Jasper spun around, shocked. He had been so engrossed in his memories he'd been unaware of the highlord's approach. "How did you find me?" he asked, gathering his scattered wits.
"My guards keep me informed. And as you know, it is easy enough for people like us to track a moving body of water. You are the only person up and about. You even have an added advantage over me. You can tell who a person is by their water." He looked around the room. "So you came here."
"Yes."
"Why?"
"Why not?"
Taquar stood, waiting for him to say something else, but he kept quiet. With growing certainty, Jasper knew his silence was a victory. There was nothing Taquar could do to him now, nothing. He smiled in the darkness, picked up his lantern and walked to the door. As he passed Taquar, he shoved Terelle's painting of him into his hands, saying pleasantly, "Perhaps she wasn't as fond of you as you like to think," and walked back to his room.
The next night, he was dismayed to see that the sentry outside his room was not a hall guard, but an enforcer. "You're going to marry Taquar?"
Jasper stared at Laisa and then started to laugh. She had come to the stormquest room just after lunch on his fourth full day at the hall and was now seated, swinging an elegantly crossed leg, in one of the upright chairs. He'd been looking at the chart Cloudmaster Granthon had given him, pinpointing all the water catchment sites and detailing how to recognize each using his water-sense.
"Is that so amusing?" she asked.
"Marriage to Taquar? I wish you joy of that!"
"It makes good sense," she said, defensive.
He thought about it. "Perhaps. I'd watch my back if I were you, though. Have you told Senya?"
"No, not yet. Why?"
"Nothing. She may be a little dismayed." The sidelong looks and flirtatious smiles Senya had been giving the highlord since they arrived in Scarcleft had not escaped his notice.
Her brow wrinkled. "She has a mild infatuation
for him, it's true. She'll soon grow out of that."
"Not, I suspect, soon enough. When is the wedding?"
"We have asked Lord Gold to perform the ceremony next Sun Day. Nothing elaborate, given my recent widowhood."
Jasper stared at her. "Lord Gold?" he asked. "The Quartern Sunpriest-that Lord Gold? He's here? Someone told me he died in the fight for Breccia!"
"Oh, the old one. Yes, he did. But his underling escaped."
"Ah." He added flatly, "That would be the last High Waterpriest, I suppose. Lord Basalt."
"Yes. As the most senior of the waterpriests, he became the new Lord Gold when the old one died. He is making the Sun Temple here in Scarcleft the main seat of the one true faith. I believe he slipped out of Breccia before the fighting started with all the regalia in his baggage. He says the old Lord Gold sent him. I wonder if that is true, myself. I suspect he fled the moment he heard Kaneth give the warning that the Reduners were attacking. As a rainlord, he had a good chance of avoiding the Reduners. He's a conniving, money-grubbing sneak if ever there was one."
"Takes one to know one, I suppose. A nasty little man, I agree."
Laisa ignored the insult. "He's already insisting on donations from the faithful to make the temple on Level Three suitable as a place of worship for a Sunpriest." She snorted.
He grimaced inwardly. The man was a religious fanatic, lacking both compassion and tolerance. Worse, he loathed Jasper. In Breccia, he had been tasked with Jasper's religious education, and had developed a deep-and justified-suspicion of the sincerity of the new stormlord's religious convictions. He was not a man Jasper had any wish to meet again.
When he didn't reply, Laisa added, "You and Senya must give some thought to your own wedding."
Jasper nodded neutrally. "Oh, I will. I will. A lot of thought."
She gave him a sharp look, but changed the subject. "Where's Taquar?"
"I have no idea. After he has brought a cloud out of the sea, he leaves me to do the rest. I am moving a cloud as we speak."
"That's impressive skill-to do it without any signs of stress."
"Moving water is not my problem."
