Stormlord’s Exile

by Glenda Larke

  Startled, Jasper took the bundle he was being handed and the woman bustled back into the bedroom. “She won’t—? Laisa? What am I supposed to do?”

  “Don’t look so horrified. She told me long ago she wouldn’t feed the child. I arranged for a wet nurse, and another woman to help out as well, and I sent for them both this morning. They should be here any moment. Senya also said they—the nurses and the child—were to be quartered with you.”

  His eyes widened. “With me? In my apartments?”

  “I have an idea she is getting her revenge for those tedious months of pregnancy. She wants you to be the one woken by a crying baby in the middle of the night. What are you going to name her?”

  “Name her? I have no idea.” He paused to look down at the tiny face now surrounded by the goat-hair blanket. “She’s so golden…” He considered that and thought of Citrine, named for the yellow quartz around Wash Drybone. But no, there would only ever be one Citrine for him. “I’ll call her Amberlyn.” It was the name the Gibber folk gave to citrines that were more orange than lemon-coloured.

  Laisa snorted derisively. “She’s probably got jaundice.”

  Amberlyn didn’t have jaundice, and soon proved herself to be a normal, noisy baby. In the meantime Senya decided to postpone the marriage until she could have a wedding dress made. Paradoxically, her stalling irritated Jasper; he wanted the ceremony over and done with.

  She ignored her daughter. Laisa didn’t seem particularly interested either, and neither of them ventured into Jasper’s apartments to see Amberlyn. He liked it that way. Now that Laisa had taken over the running of the city, he had more time on his hands, and he often spent it rocking his daughter to sleep in his arms, stroking her face with his finger, in a state of total wonder.

  “All fathers think their daughters are perfect,” the nurse, Zirca Throbbin, told him, amused by his infatuation.

  Her daughter, Crystal, was the wet nurse. To his initial horror when he met the girl, he realised she wasn’t much more than a child herself. “People survive however they can,” Zirca told him when he questioned her privately. “Crystal was raped by the Reduners. Baby stillborn, Sunlord be blessed. Don’t you be worried, m’lord, I’m here to keep an eye on her and your daughter.”

  Waterful mercy, he thought, have we come to that? Where children end up being wet nurses to survive the bad times? Still, he was glad Laisa had found the pair. They were cheerful and loving and they doted on Amberlyn.

  Sometimes he would stand out on the balcony holding his daughter, shading her from the harshness of the sun, while he sensed for Terelle. She was still in Samphire and had been for some days. He contemplated sending her a cloud message, telling her of what he had done—but how could he put news like that up in the sky for all to read? He had already written her a letter. No excuses, just the bald facts of why he would soon be a married man, with his most heartfelt apology to the woman he loved. And with it, a warning to beware, just in case Lord Gold did not keep his side of the bargain. He’d written another letter, to Elmar Waggoner this time, telling him of the Sunpriest’s threats.

  He sent them both with armed couriers to Alabaster.

  Twenty days later he and Senya were married in the courtyard of the Sun Temple. The latter part of the ceremony seemed endless. They stood in the full sun holding hands across the shallow pool while they waited for the Sunlord to give his blessing by evaporating the sacrificed water. Her hand was small and soft in his. She bestowed delighted smiles on him, for the benefit of the audience, he assumed. Under the covering of the yellow cloth the priest had wrapped around their hands, she was digging her nails into his palm until they cut the skin and drew blood.

  He felt besmirched.

  It should have been you, Terelle.

  And then, another painful thought, Oh, Amberlyn, I could never wish you away, not now. But I do wish you were Terelle’s daughter.

  Several days after the wedding, Laisa went to see Senya. She found her lying on a divan on the balcony with her hair, just tinted with rubyleaf paste, spread out in the sun to dry while she was in the shade. Laisa took the parasol from the servant girl and waved her away.

  Senya pouted. “What’s wrong now?” she asked. “And don’t let the sunlight on my face. I don’t want freckles and you know I hate brown skin.”

  “I want to talk to you about freeing Lord Taquar.”

  “Well, it’s about time. I thought you’d forgotten all about him.”

  “I couldn’t see much reason to risk my neck trying to free him before this. Now we have a motive. A very good one.”

  Senya blinked doubtfully, trying to follow her reasoning. “I give up. Why now and not earlier?”

  “Why do we have to put up with Jasper being the sandgrouse cock in the roost, my dear?”

  “Because he’s the only one who can bring us water.”

  “Right. Either with Taquar, or with Terelle. We know stormshifting doesn’t work too well with Taquar, so when it was working without him, it seemed best to just accept the situation, at least for the time being. But now…” She smiled. “There’s another player.” And I think I have finally realised what Taquar was up to…

  Senya still looked confused.

  “Oh, never mind, Senya. Let’s just get Taquar back, shall we?”

  “How? We don’t know where he is.”

  “I’ve been trying to find out.”

  “In the Scarcleft mother cistern where Jasper was? After all, that’s Lord Iani’s city now and he’s Taquar’s gaoler.”

  Laisa coughed to hide her irritation at her daughter’s unintentional obtuseness. “Senya, use your brains. You can’t keep a rainlord somewhere like that. Especially not one with Taquar’s skill. He’d mess up the water supply of the whole city and probably drown Iani while he was at it. Besides, when we were leaving Scarcleft to fight Davim, we saw Taquar—obviously drugged—being loaded onto a pede, remember? And then Iani and Jasper and Terelle all vanished. When they caught up with us, days later, we were near Pebblebag Pass. And Taquar wasn’t with them. They have him imprisoned somewhere north of the Escarpment. But where?”

  “Oh. So now what?”

  “Not much point in trying to follow Iani when he takes Taquar supplies. Iani’s a rainlord and he’d know if he was followed. I have spies in Scarcleft, men who tell me what they can—but none of them have seen anything that might lead us to Taquar. Iani has been too clever.”

  Senya held up a tress of hair to admire the highlights gleaming in the sun. “But you have another plan.”

  “A chance, yes. I think Terelle’s paintings are worth investigating. We know she helps him make it rain. We know how hard it must be to imprison a rainlord, especially one as good as Taquar. What if she used the power she has and painted him imprisoned? I want you to help me look for a painting of Taquar. You’re Jasper’s wife; guards aren’t going to question you if you enter his apartments. Especially not if Amberlyn is there. You have to start taking an interest in your daughter.”

  Senya pulled a face. “I don’t care if I never see her again.”

  “Then pretend! You’re very good at pretending. Think, Senya. If you’re wandering around with a baby in your arms, who’s going to question you? Just choose times when Jasper is not in Breccia Hall.”

  “Her paintings are kept in the stormquest room. I can’t get in there; he wears the key around his neck. How can we get it without him noticing?”

  “Well, you could—”

  “No, I could not! There is no way I’m climbing back into his bed. I hate him.”

  “I don’t suppose he’d have you anyway. I’ll think about it. In the meantime, just get the guards accustomed to you coming and going in and around his apartment, all right?”

  “All right. For Taquar.” Senya smiled, dipping her head and looking up through her lashes.

  Trying to let me know she could take Taquar away from me as easy as sipping water. Withering lot she knows. I never owned Taquar in the first place
, and never have. No one has, least of all Senya Almandine…

  Then why the hell do I want him back?

  Laisa answered that question to her own satisfaction as she left the room a few moments later. Because Taquar Sardonyx needs me. Because… my feeling for him is the nearest I’ll ever get to knowing what it is to love someone. Stupid, sand-brained choice, but the heart doesn’t follow the head. Unfortunately.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  White Quarter

  Samphire

  “Another day or two of rest won’t hurt him,” Physician Errica said as she and Terelle walked away from the Physician’s Hall, trailed at a discreet distance by Elmar and Dibble. “An untreated scorpion bite is no little thing for such an old man. He was doing well until just before you returned, when he had a bout of congestion of the lungs.”

  They had just spent an irritating run of a sandglass with Russet. He should have been glad to see her; instead he’d scolded her for the length of time she’d been gone, and then railed at Errica because she’d told him he couldn’t leave for Khromatis until he was stronger.

  Terelle glanced at the Alabaster physician, trying to look blandly neutral, and refrained from commenting.

  She suspected she hadn’t succeed when Errica pulled a face at her and said sourly, “Ye’re lucky he’s still alive, but he’ll never admit it.”

  Terelle wasn’t surprised the physician was more than a little tired of Russet’s constant grizzling. “Lucky? If he’d died, I’d be free.”

  “That’s not a very charitable statement.”

  “Why should I be charitable when he imprisoned me with his magic just so he can take me to his land against my will? And does he have an altruistic reason to do that? No! He thinks it’ll bring him back into the inner circle of power in Khromatis. I’m withered if I know why he thinks that’ll work. I don’t belong there. I don’t know anything about the place or the people, and I care even less.”

  “Kermes,” the physician said. “That’s why. The name. It is a famous one. People will respond to it.”

  “My name is Grey.”

  “Not unless you can prove your mother wed your father. Take my advice and call yourself Terelle Kermes while ye’re in Khromatis.”

  Inwardly sighing, she acknowledged the advice was probably good, but she resented the further rejection of her father, a man she would never know because Russet had killed him. “Why won’t any of you tell me about Khromatis? Why are you all so secretive?”

  “It’s forbidden.”

  “You mean you know what it’s like there, but aren’t allowed to tell?”

  Errica nodded, but said nothing. She was guiding Terelle up a narrow staircase shaded by the tall salt-brick walls of houses, to show her the view at the highest point in the city.

  “Who forbids you to talk?” Terelle was all out of patience and it was difficult not to let her irritation spill over into her tone. “You trade with them, don’t you?”

  Errica was silent. She was puffing slightly as she toiled up the steps; she was a large woman and did not move with the ease of the young or slim.

  Terelle persisted. “Do you speak their language? Can you teach me a little in the time we have before I go?”

  “We all learn the language of Khromatis. Our written language is theirs,” Errica admitted. “But there are better teachers than me. I will arrange someone.”

  “For Elmar and Dibble as well, please.” She glanced behind to where the two guards followed. They were the only members of their party remaining; the rest had already returned to the Scarpen.

  At the top of the steps, they emerged into the full sun on the flat roof. Blinking in the brightness, Terelle was astonished by the size of the area. On the far side, two white myriapedes plodded stoically around in a circle under shade awnings. They were harnessed to a beam of wood, far too solid and straight to have ever been part of any Quartern tree. Their constant pacing had worn a groove in the rock-hard salt blocks of the rooftop. Several Alabasters tended to two more beasts chewing on cut samphire while resting in the shade.

  “It’s the way we draw water up to the top levels of the city,” Errica explained. “Pede power.”

  “You bring the animals up the steps?” she asked, incredulous.

  “When they are still second-moult youngsters, yes. After that, they stay here the rest of their lives.”

  “Oh.” Those poor things, spending their lives walking in circles…

  Behind her she heard Dibble exclaim as he and Elmar arrived at the top of the steps, “I’ll be spitless! It’s bigger than the roof of Breccia Hall back home.”

  Much bigger, she thought. She walked to the closest edge and looked over the parapet.

  Samphire was a white city with glittering walls, a sparkle of towers and domes stepping elegantly down the slopes of a conical hill. The city buildings, built of blocks of hewn rock salt and baked in the dry heat of an unforgiving sun, blinded with their whiteness. The outer walls, built of salt blocks larger than she was tall, melded with the stone of its foundations in seamless unity, then towered up high and steep. The city as a whole emerged, pristine as frost, from the sea of green and purple samphire surrounding it. The single gate was made of huge logs of wood.

  The view extended in all directions. To the north, the expanse of sparkling salt that was the Whiteout; to the south, the plains pockmarked with clumps of scrawny bushes, stretching towards the Border Humps. No wonder Reduner marauders preferred to attack mines and caravans.

  The wall won’t help them if the Reduners attack their water supply, she thought morosely. Always, always, water was at the heart of everything, and Samphire’s water was tunnelled in from the Border Humps. She could see the towers of the inspection shafts striding away in a straight line towards Senruk Wells, which they had passed on their way in from Breccia.

  Unlike Scarpen cities, no smelters or firing kilns belched outside the walls. Instead, fields of samphire came right up to the foot of the ramparts. She could see workers bending and straightening, harvesting the succulent stems and loading the pede panniers. At this distance, the pedes were so small they appeared hardly larger than desert millipedes. The city itself was built with pede transport in mind: streets wide enough for laden packpedes to pass, squares large enough for the animals to turn around. Street lads armed with brooms and scoops waited on almost every corner to collect pede droppings for fuel.

  And as for their people, where were all the poor? Or, for that matter, the rich? Everyone dressed more or less the same. Plain white robes for indoor use and for manual workers; mirrored robes at other times. The mirrors flashed irritatingly when they caught the sun, but Errica had given her one such robe to wear, so she did. She didn’t like the weight of it tugging at her neck and it didn’t make her blend in any better. The brown of her skin would always make her conspicuous among pale-skinned Alabasters, like a dark sand-flea on a white cat.

  People in the street stopped to stare when she passed. There was a clannishness about them that excluded the outlander, even when they were welcoming.

  Their sameness—it has a price. The different don’t fit in. I wouldn’t like to live here.

  As she wondered just how to extract more information from Errica so she could arm herself for her trip to Khromatis, she absent-mindedly fingered the wall next to her. It was smooth and dry, yet it glistened in the light as if wet.

  “This is the one place in all the Quartern where we don’t want it to be raining.” The voice that spoke at her shoulder was not the one she had expected; when she turned it was to find Errica had disappeared. Instead, she was being addressed by an elderly Alabaster man leaning on a walking stick. He was vaguely familiar, but for a moment she couldn’t place him. Must be someone I met last time I was here.

  “Salt dissolves in water. Samphire City would melt if it rained,” he explained. “Eventually.”

  “Oh! Yes, I suppose so.” She looked at the wall uneasily. “I find it hard to think of salt as building bl
ocks.”

  “The original city was built of stone. It’s still there, under our feet. What’s left of it is now our cellars and cisterns. Nobody used salt blocks back in the days when it rained, any more than they lived in the mines, either. The rain turned the Whiteout into a lake back in those days.”

  “So I’ve heard.” Then she remembered who he was and flushed hotly. “You’re the Bastion. Forgive me—”

  “Nothing to forgive. I asked to see ye informally, like this. Errica and Feroze have both told me that ye’ve been asking many astute questions—which they aren’t able to be answering. The law forbids it.”

  Flustered and at a loss, Terelle wondered in a panic if she’d broken the law by asking.

  He saw her confusion and smiled. “Come. There are stairs over there leading down to my offices. Dismiss your guards. I’ll see that ye are returned safely to the Emery Townhouse.”

  She did as he asked and followed him down the steps that led inside the building, assailed by loneliness and a wild moment of unreality: she, a snuggery girl, about to chat to the ruler of one of the quarters?

  “I am… not above the law,” he was saying as he limped downwards, “but I am in a position to be bending it a little. And I happen to be thinking ye deserve that much.”

  The room they entered at the bottom of the steps was small and cramped and contained no luxuries except board-books and scrolls. Of those, there were plenty, filling the shelves carved into the thick walls. The Bastion waved her into one of the half dozen chairs—the usual heavy armchairs carved of rock salt. At least these had cushions. She sat, feeling herself dwarfed by its size, and he sat opposite, sitting back with a sigh of relief. The smile he then bestowed on her was benign, but his milky bluish eyes, small in their age-shrunken sockets, shone with a sharp intelligence.

  “I trust your journey here was more pleasant this time,” he said.

  “Much, thank you. Jasper—the Cloudmaster—was worried about Reduners, but we saw none. We did see signs that they’ve been raiding caravansaries, though. Mostly to take water, I suppose.”