by Sylvia Kelso
And when the answer was, No, she had no heart to stay.
Tellurith says flatly, “See Hanni. I’ll speak to Iatha. If we can’t keep you, we’ll remember you.” What, says her glare, if it is charity? “It’s the honor of the House.”
And surety that a crippled woman will end her life in comfort, that her men need not go out to work, to break limbs or ruin backs as do River Quarter poor. That the illusion of House status will remain.
And it matters less than an illusion. What mattered was the work; the touch, the contact, the thing that makes Craft more than a trade, and qherrique far more than merchandise. The thing for which her daughter died, because she could not bear a second-best. What charity, Veristya’s eyes ask, can recompense us that?
Out in the passageway, feeling the cold run down her backbone, Tellurith thinks, That could have been me. If my mother’s blood had failed. If my father’s line had not bred true. I could have been hanging from that lintel.
Or out in the Craftless street.
Right up to House-head, the custom holds. The limited room of a Craft-wing admits only active Crafters’ kin.
Shoulder to shoulder in custom as automatic as it is comforting, Quira grumbles, “Mother’s love.”
Tellurith does not have to translate: The Mother witness how I hate my role in such deaths and banishments. Such cruel custom. Such stern necessity.
She does not have to utter such falsities as, They’ll have funds, they’ll be all right. She need only grip Quira’s shoulder, solid as ever, if a little more bowed. And nod when Quira sighs and growls, “S’pose I’ll have Kessa and Chreizo scrapping over the rooms now, like a pair of Korite dogs.”
“Ah,” says Tellurith. All-purpose agreement, acknowledgement. “Send them to me if it gets out of control.”
“Harh!” Momentarily isolate in the corridor, Quira backs her snort with an insubordinate shoulder-slap. “You want to run a test on me?”
* * * *
There is nothing subordinate about the black-ice stare that beleaguers her coffee cup next morning. Hot, heart-starting necessity that she usually grabs one-handed on her way to choose a coat.
Tellurith sighs. Does up another shirt button. Says without looking behind, “Verrith, we’ll survive five minutes without you. In my workroom. Tell Hanni, noon-break today at home. In the book.”
* * * *
“You were going to show me what was dangerous.”
“You were going to prove yourself fit.”
“Prove?”
“By physicians’ standards.”
Biting his lip, he glares. Then, too swiftly for forestallment, “Talk to me, then! Explain this—if Amberlight’s just a city, and such a limited city, why haven’t Dhasdein or Verrain or Cataract tried to take the qherrique?”
Tellurith pushes aside her glass. Carefully averts her mind from an answer learned in infant’s clothes. Takes breath as at the mother-face, and answers calmly, “They have.”
Into that startled glare, she goes on, “Do you remember any thieves’ tales?”
“Hey?”
“They still tell them, up and down the River.” Garnered, she does not add, by our intelligencers. “Amberlight troublecrew are witches. At night they change shape. Then they sniff out thieves before they leave the quayside and run them down like dogs.”
“Huh!”
She lets her own lip curl in response.
“Or the story of the Mel’ethi Master-thief, Bellissar? Who thought to seduce a House-head and get her swag an easier way?”
“Bellissar—Bellissar—something—about hands . . .”
“Hands, yes.” Tellurith lets her own curl lightly about a piece of silverware. Fluidity of muscle and tendon, delicacy of knuckle and palm, instrument so vital, so lightly prized, until it is lost.
“Bellissar stole the password from the Head one night in her sleep. The guards,” she does not curl her lip this time. All Amberlight know there are none. “The guards let her into the mine. They found her next morning, lying at the mother-face. The Houses said, From a Master-thief, the qherrique has taken its own toll. And they let her go.”
“Go—” a hissing breath. “To beg her bread on a Deyiko street-corner. Because her hands were gone at the wrist. Burnt away.”
“So you do remember that?”
Their eyes clinch. Before he tosses himself back in his chair. “Ballads! Old wives’ tales.”
“Then do you remember any history?”
“Of what?”
“Say—the first coalition of Verrain and Dhasdein.”
The eyes slit. Concentration darkens to a frown. Becomes a baffled glare. Her pulse easing, before he can sink to fury, Tellurith speaks herself.
“The commander-in-chief, the imperial general Kassikas, captured Amberlight. His engineers tried to mine the qherrique. The shaft fell in on them. A fugitive House-head raised the City, massacred his army, and sent his head in a pickle-barrel to the emperor.”
The eyes skewer her. Then the lip curls. He murmurs, with blacker irony, “Dangerous.”
Tellurith nods. Steadies her breath, as for the second cut at the face. “Do you recall the first coalition of Cataract, Verrain and Dhasdein?”
The frown, the head-toss anticipate his, “Get to the point!”
“It was proclaimed at a winter’s fall. By spring, a Quetzistani fanatic had assassinated the emperor. By next spring, Dhasdein had a civil war.”
She waits, watching him as she would watch Maeran, across the table’s space. There is fiercened intent now, effort to unearth memory. That ends in another infuriated breath.
“The second coalition,” says Tellurith precisely, “was seventy years later. The Dhasdeini commander-in-chief cut his throat after a scandal that named him lover of the Empress. Raids out of Quetzistan overthrew Verrain’s president, and when Cataract invaded Verrain territory, Amberlight refused the new president a statuette.”
His knuckles are white on the table-edge. The eyes are all but burning her.
When she does not speak, he whispers it. “But Cataract had to withdraw.”
Silently, Tellurith looks back at him. When he in turn is silent, she murmurs, “The third coalition of Verrain and Dhasdein—ended after an uprising in Quetzistan.”
Very slowly, very carefully, he slides back in his chair. Lets the table go. Those eyes are still devouring her.
Presently he says, almost in a purr, “Amberlight’s intelligencers must be very—dangerous.”
No doubt that he has understood it all. No doubt that he has engineered such machinations himself. No doubt that she is playing with fire as dangerous as very qherrique. And no doubt that those eyes have never, for a moment, shown a flicker of remembrance, consciousness, recognition of anything but the past.
Tellurith answers as softly, “Oh, yes.”
Their eyes hold, as duelists hold the balance of crossed blades. Then Hanni comes hurriedly out of the workroom, calling, “Ruand? Iatha says there’s another fight on the quay . . .”
It is a relief to get up, indeed to spring to her feet. To call, “I’m coming!” and catch his explosion as a parting shot.
“Well, if you can’t spare two minutes a day, give me someone who can! Let me talk to your blasted—minders! Give me some exercise! Let me out!”
* * * *
Out, Caitha cancels with one flat, No. Exercise, Iatha and Zuri take up with only less enthusiasm than Azo, granted leave to work out her charge, under Shia’s strenuous protest, on the commandeered heirloom rugs. “Just don’t bend him,” is Tellurith’s proviso.
Honors on the rugs prove equal. “He’s a fine fighter,” pronounces Azo with satisfaction. “Taught me two new throws. But he’s not Cataract.” Her opponent, favoring a shoulder, adds with a glittering smile, “Your security is up to expectations.”
And with a black frown, “Your godforsaken physician had a fit.”
Beyond that, troublecrew conversation fails. So with malice aforethought Tellurith hands Iatha the job. “No one else,” she smiles wickedly, “knows enough to ask without giving too much away.”
Iatha’s bout is even less use: “I don’t blab,” his black stare disdainful, “to intelligencers—”—“All he does is ask about you—rot it, give over, ’Rith!”
* * * *
“You could always,” sweetly, over the dinner-soup, “throw me out.”
If, challenge unspoken, I’m more trouble than I’m worth.
Tellurith sets aside her glass.
“So we could. It costs three copper fiels a day for the cheapest shelter in River Quarter—shared straw in the tenements. It costs five silver darrin for passage to Quasharn,” the nearest town over the Verrain border, “and thirty to Cataract. If you know where you’re going. Just for the River Quarter, weapons would help. For eating—in Amberlight, you could always beg.”
The silence is murder, holding its breath.
“And,” she goes on gently, “we do own the clothes on your back.”
She smiles more sweetly while he sits glaring, trembling, and her heart beats up in her throat.
Until with a great gasp he lets go his breath. The recoil of a catapult.
“So tell me, what’s the going rate for whores?”
“Skilled ones, Uphill, can make fifty darrin a mark.”
“Ah—! And you would know?”
Tellurith grins, marking the blow unworthy. “In Amberlight, whores are male.”
“Gods damn you . . .”
Head in arms, fists clenched together over the table, shoulders flexing; then his wrists jerk and he thrusts both hands before him, palms smearing blood across the immaculate cloth.
“That’s enough!”
Tellurith is up, all risk forgotten, catching at shoulders, gripping hands. He makes one savage attempt to wrest his fingers loose; then sinks back, spent and mute as Darrya when she left the qherrique. She holds him in the chair, part restraint, part embrace.
“You know,” gentle as art and will can make it, “cutting at each other is pointless. People just get hurt.”
He is still breathing like a winded rower. Probably unable to speak.
“If there was more time for you, I would make it. I don’t delay for malice. Will you believe that?”
It is too familiar, the urge to comfort, the feel of that wiry, defiant, disabled physical presence in her grasp. That wing of hair is in his face again. There is a vulnerable look about the mouth. She takes her hands from his shoulders, and steps back.
Before she puts those hands somewhere else.
Finally he wipes his face on an arm, and lifts his eyes.
“I—when I’m cornered, I have to fight.”
Where, Tellurith rages, do I find a matching gift?
She takes his hands again. Turns them palm up. With an also immaculate napkin, dabs clean abrasions taken on Exchange Square, opened back to the blood. “If you’re careful, Caitha needn’t ever know.” From somewhere he manages a grin, stabbing her to the heart. “There are hundreds of things untried yet. If you could work with Iatha—if you could just wait . . .”
“Wait,” he says, on a note that stabs deeper still. The eyes, somber now, stare into the blood-heart of his wine. “What is it—three weeks?”
“Mm.” Like every craft-woman, Tellurith carries moon time at her fingertips. “That’s not so long—”
He looks at her now without fire. Without hope. Her tongue goes on for her, “Will you wait until we round up the gang that attacked you? See if it brings back . . . anything?”
* * * *
Five boys, four girls. Twelve to eighteen, perhaps. Through the dirt, and the madly unkempt hair, and the bizarre layers of clothes, it is hard to tell. Sold for a pittance by their fellow gangs to the Telluir intelligencers, chained in a line in Telluir courtyard, for their first look at Uphill Amberlight.
“Watch them through the shutter when they turn.” In the lower tower room, Tellurith takes her charge lightly by the arm. Far too fond, she is lately, of taking it. The one touch he does not protest.
Finely, through the hard-set muscle, she can feel him shaking. If no shred of first-hand memory remains, the pain must be indelible. The knowledge of what they did to him. That they have not only violated his body, but stolen his mind. Stripped away his life.
At a bark from someone, the line begins to move. Faces lift, turn toward the spectators’ window. Sullenly closed. Expectant of nothing, except some mysterious Uphill cruelty. And most likely, death.
Seven, eight, nine. No need to ask, Do you recognize one? His body has not responded. Not by a single twitch.
* * * *
“Ruand! Ruand! Oh, Mother protect us, Moon-lady save and salvage us, Ruand, wake up—!”
Tellurith comes upright with a plunge, slaps the invading face away, just pulls her following fist. Shia babbles at her, full morning behind her in the hallway, calamity in her squawks.
“Verrith, Azo—they’re sleeping, I can’t wake them! And the door’s undone—and him, he’s gone!”
CHAPTER III
“Watched to find the sleep-syrup and dosed his minders along with you. Zuri’s fit to burst. Anything last night he didn’t eat? Didn’t drink?” Tellurith shakes her head. Iatha grunts. “No matter. Shia remembers him fidgeting round the kitchen. Nothing new, he’s in and out ten times a day.”
And the rest hangs in the air: Damned indecent, as well as disastrous. Into the tower with him, ’Rith.
If, neither has to add, we ever get him back.
“How,” Tellurith’s voice is icy, “did he manage the rest?”
Apart from taking her own clothes, and a dozen small valuables, and basic dried food and the longest kitchen knife.
“The ground-patrol never saw him. Out a window on the uphill side. Down a sheet,” Tellurith’s own, she does not add, “straight into the road.”
A very thorough plundering of the cuckoo’s nest. And the thought of a straight-haired black-avised outlander man trying to traverse River Quarter in a House-head’s leggings, coat and embroidered shirt would be funny as well as a sure trail.
Could they be sure he went that far.
“Jura would tell me. So would Zhee. Damas . . .”
The easiest, most terrifying, most untraceable ploy of all. He only has to knock and demand asylum. In the nearest House.
“And I told him—Mother blind me—the ones in sight.”
Anguish has no place in Iatha’s voice. Any more than abject guilt. Any more than the glimpse of Verrith in Desis’ arms along the passageway. Lover’s consolation, sought only for the most grievous grief.
Tellurith sits staring straight into the workroom wall; but she puts a hand out, briefly, to shut on her steward’s bowed neck, under the crinkly, grizzled plait.
“Don’t blame yourself, Yath.” The old pet name is bizarre in that icy, direst-emergency voice. “It’s not your fault.”
* * * *
But when Iatha darts into the workroom at midnight her step is nearer a dance; she actually catches her Head’s wrists and spins her about from the chalk-map on the wall.
“He went Downhill! Moon’s turn, third morning hour! Quir clan’s running a warehouse patrol at the Quarter edge, of course they noticed a man in women’s gear—first ask-around, Zuri’s people turned it up!”
Tellurith’s eyes thaw. She shoves back crushed sleeves; even grabs her steward, a head shorter, in a bearish hug. “Mother bless—!”
Smiling. Crumpled skin, ice-topaz eyes alight. Before she adds, casually, “When we get him back, I’ll have his tripes.”
* * * *
Either he left the city, or he did not. If he stayed, he
has to have found money. Traded that loot. Which could only be done, before daylight, in River Quarter. Which can be traced.
Likewise, the help, the hiding-place, must cost money.
Which can be traced.
Tellurith works down the decision tree, against the back of her eyelids, in faintest phosphorescent marbling of banked qherrique on her bedroom wall. In memory hang the fetid alleys, the filthy straw-beds of River Quarter, the flea-ridden winter clothes in the lenders’ shops. In her nose is the scent of polished wood, under her, in the warmth, the touch of clean linen sheets.
If he didn’t stay, then he left. Which also needed money. Which also can be traced. He has to have gone downstream. Or upstream. Which can be traced. How many ships left in that next day?
Or the one after. Or today.
Perhaps, having gone to ground, he doubled back.
The qherrique pulsates, faintest luminance. So deeply silent, the apartment, she can hear Azo’s breathing, down the hall.
The intelligencers are at work. What if it’s three days?
It would be quicker, with a reward.
And plain as blood in the water, to other intelligencers.
If he’s in the Quarter, why in the Mother’s name doesn’t it show?
Tellurith gets out of bed. Catches up last evening’s coat, the deep wine-red of Amberlight stone, goes silently, wrapping it round her, out to the balustrade.
In the colorless pre-dawn glow, River Quarter is studded with yellow seeds of light. Candles, lamp-lit windows. Waking stevedores, homing whores. Easy, terrifyingly easy, to beg a hiding-place down there. One woman with a good eye for a man, and exotic tastes.
Or perhaps, a whore.
Fifty darrin a mark.
“Rot and gangrene you,” she says under her breath, stomach twisting at the memory of blood on moon-lit stone. “If you’ve come at that . . .”
The brothels are not choosy. Perhaps he has been enslaved. Instead of, as well as, being raped.
Perhaps he never reached them. Perhaps the gangs did their work, this time, once and for all.
* * * *
“No, Ruand.” Stolid, imperturbable, double-cured Zuri, troublecrew Head, whose eyelids are creased with sleeplessness and whose intelligencers are the best in Amberlight. “There were a couple of victims, but none outlander. And none dead.”