by Glenda Larke
“Not good odds, huh?”
“No. But maybe we can do a bit to make them better.”
She crossed over to sit on the end of his bunk. “Like what?”
“Been thinking about it. A lot. Maybe it might be a good idea for you to divide your paints, in fact all your painting stuff, into three equal lots. Then we each carry one.”
She frowned. “Why?”
“Terelle, the paints are your power, and they can be taken from you. You need a back-up. We’ll carry it. Them. Two back-ups.”
“Ah. Yes. What else?”
“I want to teach you and Dibble the sort of thing that Lord Kaneth and I used out on patrol. How to leave messages for one another in case we are separated, how to leave a trail and how to follow a trail without alerting others. How to use hand signals without speaking.”
“That’s also a good idea,” she agreed. “And we all need to learn as much as we can of the Khromatian tongue. I’ve arranged lessons while we’re still in Samphire. And then the guards who ride with us to the border will teach us more.”
Dibble groaned. “Lessons. I’ve never been much of a one for lessons.”
“These ones might save your life. Or mine,” she told him with a severity Elmar knew was only half a joke. “And now I am—without the slightest compunction—going to tell you all the secrets I’ve learned. Just remember they are secrets.”
Elmar hid a grin. I do so like a practical woman, he thought.
The first part of the journey north-east was easy enough; stones across the salt marked the trails. They picked up water two days out at Fucoid Mine and then several days later at Mine Sylvine. Besides Feroze, there were ten young armed Alabaster warriors with them. Russet, in a shaded basket chair made for the elderly, rode on the baggage pede.
Oddly enough it was Dibble who did best with learning the language of Khromatis. Sitting around the campfire of a night, with the flames spitting like water on a griddle because of the salt mixed in with the pede droppings, the Alabasters vied with one another to give the most memorable lessons. The pedemen had decided that teaching Dibble and Elmar was an amusing way to pass the time. Dibble played the role of a sand-witted armsman, diverting them with his outrageous mistakes and never taking it amiss when they made fun of him.
“It’s actually easy,” he confided to Terelle and Elmar. “There’s a music to it. All you have to do is remember the words, like memorising a song…”
Elmar did try, but was forced to admit he had no ear for a tune and kept forgetting the words. Terelle had her waterpainter’s memory. When she wrote words down, together with their meaning, she remembered them forever. Feroze was her teacher, and he appeared to enjoy the lessons, so her progress was rapid, although he did complain her accent was woeful.
A day out of Sylvine, they hit the first of the salt marshes that began the Borderlands. They camped there at the edge of the marsh, near a band of samphire about fifty paces wide, after which the land gradually became grey and soggy, indented with shallow puddles covered in greenish slime. Half a mile in, there was no more samphire, just a salt and mud bog.
“Don’t walk into it,” Feroze warned Terelle as she stood in the samphire looking across to where they would be travelling. “Under the scum it becomes clingy wet glue. Step in it, and ye’ll sink to your knees and, believe me, it’s no joke trying to pull a person out again.”
“So much water in there,” she said, incredulous. “Just lying around?”
“Yes, but it’s as salty as can be, and quite useless.”
“It smells awful.”
“That’s the scum. Horrible stuff.”
“Wet ground,” she said, marvelling. “It seems…” she hunted for a word to describe the profundity of her shock, “sacrilegious.”
She glanced around the camp, at the fire sparking and spitting in blues and greens, at the guards cutting fresh samphire for dinner, at the pedes grazing hungrily among the plants. The scene was safe, reassuring, even familiar. And that safety, that familiarity, would soon be behind her, inaccessible. She was going to a place where water lay about on the ground, and flowed past as rivers.
“How do we cross the Borderlands if it’s all so gluey?” she asked.
“Oh, the pedes have no problem. Their weight—and ours—is spread over all those legs, and onto their bellies too, when the going gets very soft. As long as we stay on their backs, we’ll be fine. The problem is always to find dry land to make camp in the midst of the muck.”
“When I was talking to you back in Samphire, you told me the Alabasters were exiled for silencing God. What did you mean?”
He looked stricken. “It is difficult for me to speak of such iniquity. Ask Russet.” With that, he strode away to where the pedes were munching the samphire, and a moment later she saw him grooming one of the animals.
She sought Russet, who was huddled by the fire on his colourful woven mat, and sat down beside him, directly on the salt.
“The Alabaster won’t be telling ye what ye want to be knowing,” he said with a touch of his malicious glee. “Upset him, did ye?”
“Feroze suggested I ask you to explain about the Alabasters silencing God.”
He gave a high-pitch chuckle. “Such silliness. Superstition! Old myths the Khromatians would be forgetting long ago, except—” He dropped his voice and beckoned her closer. “—’cept it suits Khromatis for Alabasters to believe it.” He poked her in the ribs with a sharp finger. “Ye not be worrying over such. Worry about the Verdigris, if ye must.”
“Verdigris?” It was the bright green colour in one of her paint pots. She wondered if his mind was wandering.
He poked her again, grinning. “Your worst enemy, girl. Verdigris family. Ye’ll see. Get hold of ye, and they’ll throw ye off the walls of the Peak.”
She knew he was waiting for her to ask what the Peak was, but she would not give him the satisfaction. Revolted, hating him, she stared silently back into his small green eyes.
“Just as well I be painting ye, no? Ye be safe. For a while.”
And for the rest of the evening, he refused to say another word.
Terelle was awoken in the middle of the night by the touch of gritty fingers on her face. She shrieked and sat upright, her heart hammering wildly.
No one was touching her. Elmar lay on one side of her, snoring gently, wrapped tight in his cloak and blanket; Russet lay on the other, but not asleep. From the glint of starlight in his eyes, she knew he was looking at her.
She touched her cheek. Under her fingertips she felt the roughness of salt grains. Calming her beating heart, she looked around. Two rows of sleeping people lay stretched out on the salt, none of them more than a few paces from her, with Dibble on one end. Further away, Feroze stood next to another guard, holding a lit candle lantern high. They were both staring away into the darkness behind her head, bodies rigid with tension. She looked over her shoulder to see what made them stare so fixedly—and froze in terror.
Towering over her, only a few paces away, was a salt-dancer. She’d seen such dancers before, swirls of salt caught in a spindevil, but not one like this. It was three times as high as a pede was tall, its body wavering, arms shivering and undulating. Further away, several others cavorted across the plains, the salt of their ghostly bodies sparkling in the starlight. These were not the usual amorphous shapes, nor mirages either, but fearsome human-like monsters with holes for eyes in elongated faces. The hair stood up on the back of Terelle’s neck and her heart pounded even harder. She wanted to reach out and shake Elmar awake, but she was too scared to move.
The nearest dancer bent and reached out a hand to touch her. Panting in horror as fingers dragged across her cheek, she gasped and slapped the ghostly fingers away with both her hands. Her blow scattered the salt, leaving the arm truncated at the wrist.
She scrambled up as Feroze approached and Elmar woke. “Don’t worry,” Feroze murmured as Elmar tumbled out of his blankets, already grasping his sword. “They c
an’t hurt ye. They’re just salt.”
“No. S-salt-dancers are just salt flurries, sh-shapeless wisps scurrying this way and that. These are people! Huge people. But…” They were made of salt. Anxiety made her voice quaver. Next to her, Elmar gaped at the salt-dancer, then poked it tentatively with his blade. Nothing changed.
“No. Not people. Water sensitives mixed that foul water of the Borderlands with salt, so that the salt flurries can be manipulated.”
She shivered. “That’s impossible! No water sensitive can do that.”
“These are waterlords especially trained to sense those who don’t have the peculiarities of Alabaster blood. They’ve grouped together to be menacing ye—the four of ye. They’ve jumped to the conclusion ye and Russet are Quartern folk too. They want to be scaring ye away from the border. Don’t worry, they can’t hurt ye.”
“You won’t get into trouble with them, will you?”
He shrugged. “They need us, as much as we need them. They need all the other minerals we mine here in the Whiteout and the Border Humps. They need what we import from the Gibber. They need our labour for their manufactories and their fields. Go to sleep, Terelle. Salt-dancers have no power except to scare.” He smiled and walked away, the light from his lantern swinging the shadows as he left.
She snuggled back down into her bedding, wrapping herself against the cold. “Did you see that?” she asked Russet. “Your people welcoming us. What makes you think they’ll greet us with affection when we cross the Borderlands?”
“We are Kermes. Your grandmother married a Verdigris,” he said. “Rulers, all. Watergivers. Waterlords. Deserving of respect.”
But she didn’t believe it, not the part about respect. Elmar snorted, indicating he didn’t think much of the reasoning, either. She’d already known that her grandmother, Russet’s daughter Magenta, had married the ruler of Khromatis, the man they called the Pinnacle, but now he had given her another piece of the puzzle. The Pinnacle’s family name was Verdigris, and Russet thought they were his enemies and therefore hers too. Sunblast you, Russet. Why can’t you just say things outright? She wondered if perhaps he was growing senile; he seemed worse now than he had been before. Being bitten by the scorpion and then almost dying of thirst had aged his mind as much as his body.
She dropped back into an uneasy doze, her last thoughts of Khromatian Watergivers who hated strangers so much they used their energies to scare them away. The nearest of them must still be over a hundred miles away, and yet they’d not only manipulated water with finesse, they’d used it to manipulate damp salt.
The power they must have…
The pedes didn’t seem to mind the salty stagnant water or the greyish mud that sucked at their pointed feet and oozed up between their segment plates, but Terelle hated it. The stench of wet rot, the grey drabness of the mire, the horrible viscosity of it, the weird salt mists that blanketed them for long periods while the pedes picked their way across the marsh: she loathed it all. The smell not only permeated the air, it seeped into the fabric of their clothing and clung to their bedding; it contaminated their drinking water with its stench and made their food taste mouldy even when it wasn’t.
No permanent paths crossed the Borderlands. As fast as a track was made, it was swallowed up by the shifting pools and mud ponds and sluggish trickles of water welling up from underground. Apart from birds, the only living creatures were grey mudworms, some of them as long as an arm, basking in the pools as they digested the soil and exuded long lines of waste behind them. Herons and stilts feasted and screeched with annoyance if the caravan came too close. Nights were cold and damp, full of sucking and slithering sounds as worms pushed their way through the muck. Feroze used his water-senses to find patches of dryer soil where they could light a fire or sleep, but the mud and stagnant water were never more than a few paces away.
“Give me a battle any day,” Elmar said at breakfast after their first night in the marsh. “This place belongs in a nightmare.”
“The worst is the water,” Dibble grumbled. “It’s supposed to be precious, not rotten.”
Terelle glanced at the horizon. It was jagged with far-off mountains. Another strangeness, that white capping of—what was it Russet had called it?
“Snow,” he said when she asked again later that morning. Their pedes were ambling along side by side, their feet making odd plopping noises as they lifted, followed by a squelch as they sank back down. Elmar was driving her, with Dibble behind, and Feroze was driving Russet. “To be getting to the Peak, ye’ll cross those mountains.”
“Why would I want to go there? Is that where you painted me?”
He shook his head. When she said nothing, he added, “The Peak be the main city of Khromatis. Seat of the Pinnacle.”
Fear dried her mouth and lips. She’d thought initially that if she was to bring waterlords to the Quartern, she’d have to visit those close to the Pinnacle. Now it was sounding more and more like a bad idea. She’d be damned if she’d go to the Peak or to the Pinnacle just because Russet wanted her to, for some selfish reason of his own.
“There’s no point to secrets anymore,” she said. “I’ll see for myself soon. I need to know as much as you can tell me. What will we find on the other side of the Borderlands?”
“Nothing ye’ve ever seen before,” he said. “A place where soil burns in fireplaces, where Alabasters be labouring like animals for us, where water is for wasting, where land be growing green.”
“Oh, for once in your life, can’t you say something that will be of use?” she cried. “Your secrecy might cripple me. If you want my cooperation, you have to tell me what I’m supposedly heir to. You have to tell me all you know. Where is the place you painted me? What can you tell me about our family?”
“Your tongue be too sharp, girl!”
“And yours too twisted. Russet, I am out of patience. Tell me what I need to know.”
“Ye be too like your mother. Magenta be always rude, like this. She be not disciplining ye, as the Pinnacle be wanting.”
“I’m not Sienna. Magenta was my grandmother, not my mother. And I never knew her.”
He looked shocked, then said, snappishly, “Of course I be knowing who ye are.” Then he mumbled something she couldn’t catch.
Oh, weeping hells, what will I do if his mind goes?
She said, more politely, “The Pinnacle was your son-in-law when you left Khromatis. But do you know if he’s still alive? Maybe someone else is the Pinnacle now.”
His face paled and he swayed. If it hadn’t been for his chair, he would have fallen.
Feroze glanced behind to make sure he was all right and answered her question. “The Pinnacle is never called by name, any more than we call the Bastion by name. I believe, though, that there was a change of ruler about ten years ago and the present Pinnacle is the brother of the last.”
Russet brightened. “Ochre be dead then? Good!” He directed another of his gleeful smiles at Terelle. “Then Pinnacle now be usurper. Ye be Pinnacle!”
She snorted. “That’s daft.” You were just told your son-in-law is dead and you’re happy about it? Thinking about it made her go cold all over. Did he have a heart in that scrawny body of his?
Mother, I never knew you, but I understand why you ran away.
“Feroze,” she asked, “is the Pinnacle ever a woman?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. Terelle, ye have to be understanding that Khromatians never discuss such matters with us. They don’t think it…” He searched for the right word. “Seemly. To them we’ve no right to be treated as equals or informed about anything.”
“That’s disgusting. You Alabasters work for them and they don’t want to talk to you?”
“That’s right. Unless it’s to give orders, of course.”
Russet laughed.
Terelle was so furious with him she didn’t look his way. “Do any of them speak your tongue?”
“Oh, everyone does in the Southern Marches. That’s
the area where Alabasters work,” Feroze said. “Even though we speak their language, and it’s not necessary for them to learn ours, they do. Every household has an Alabaster tutor to teach the children.”
“We be not trusting ye,” Russet said, still grinning. “Want to know what ye be saying.”
“Your problem with the language will be once you leave the Southern Marches,” Feroze added. “Khromatians from the north don’t bother to learn.”
“Like me,” Russet said. “Be not knowing till learning in the Quartern. Sienna, ye do what I tell ye, there be no problem.”
“Who’s he talking about?” Elmar asked, puzzled, when the other pede drew ahead and Russet was out of earshot.
“My mother. He’s getting us muddled. It’s not the first time, either.”
Elmar turned to look her full in the face. “That’s not good.”
“No.”
“I’d rather take you home. Terelle, are you sure you can’t withstand his painting?”
“I’m sure.”
“Best then you concentrate on getting him to tell you exactly where this place is, the one where he painted you. We go there, then leave for home.”
She smiled at him. “And try to pick up some stray waterlords looking for adventure along the way?” It wasn’t much of a joke, but it was the best she could do. Inside, her apprehension swelled, threatening to consume her.
Even though she knew the power of the painting would see to it that she ended up in the right place whether she liked it or not, she took Elmar’s advice and continued to question Russet about the location. Finally, in their last camp inside the Borderland marshes, he told her the place was close to Kermes Manor, the house owned by his family.
“Born there, me,” he said. “Magenta born there too, but she was a beauty.” He looked her up and down in scorn. “Not plain, like ye. So I be taking her to the Peak, to meet the Pinnacle. He liked beauties, that man.”
“Ochre Verdigris?”
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Feroze’s head swing up in shock to stare at them.
