by Glenda Larke
Dibble climbed up onto his pede. “Yes.”
Elmar looked across at him. “Good luck, Dibs.”
Dibble nodded. “You too, El.” His voice was husky.
“Oh, and one other thing: the house is on fire. Don’t let that bother you. Terelle won’t get burned, but it might keep the Khromatians occupied for a bit once they realise.” No sooner had he said the words than there was panicked yelling in the distance. “Reckon someone just realised. Let’s go. Good luck, m’lad.”
“Same to you, old man,” Dibble said cheekily, and the two of them prodded their mounts into action.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Khromatis
Marchford
Manor house of the Commander of the Southern Marches
When Terelle started on the painting, her concentration was total. She had to do this right. If she’d had more time she might have thought of something better—but every moment she spent thinking was another step closer to death for Feroze, Dibble and Elmar. Always, always she was hemmed in by the limitations of waterpainting: you couldn’t paint yourself and you couldn’t paint the impossible. And worse than the limitations was the viper under the rock: the unexpected result that the artist hadn’t anticipated.
And so she painted the most harmless thing she could think of: the three men standing together in front of the huge gates of Samphire.
She’d almost finished when there was a knock at the door. For a while she ignored the sound, and painted on. The knocking grew louder.
Feigning befuddlement, as if she’d just woken, she asked sleepily, “Whatissit?”
The reply came in the Quartern tongue. “Cousin, it’s Jet Verdigris.” The middle son. “Can I talk to you?”
“Yes, of course. Just a moment.” She worked on, frantic.
He was silent for a while, then knocked again. “Hey, it’s cold out here.”
“Just a moment. I’m not dressed. I’d gone to bed.”
Apparently taking her at her word, he was silent. She finished some of the finer details with the tiniest spills and manipulation of powder.
“Come on, cousin, this is ridiculous! You don’t need to dress up.” He started banging on the door, hard.
“All right, all right, I’m coming.” Her heart thumped. He no longer sounded friendly. “What’s all that noise outside?” she asked. “What’s happening?”
“That’s what I want to talk to you about.”
She examined the painting and could find nothing else that needed doing. Shutting out the pounding at the door and stilling the hammering of her heart with willpower, she reached down into the depths of herself, touched the essence of the painting and shuffled up the motley.
Immediately, she knew there was something wrong. Something botched, as Shale would have said. Terror prickled, shivered through her body, paralysed her. She forced the shuffling upwards, manipulating the paint to work its magic.
It ripped. Tore widthwise as well as deep into its heart. Tore part of her soul. The battering, the angry sounds outside, all faded into the background, almost unheard. The painting in its bowl rippled, created a wave. She felt as if the world had tilted, then rearranged itself, but the new configuration was wrong. Botched.
Oh, Shale.
Confused, she thought she smelled smoke, then saw wisps creeping into the room through the cracks in the wooden floor. Fire? Had she done that?
She looked back at the painting. Feroze, in the centre—or rather the paint that had formed him—had sunk to the bottom of the bowl. For a moment she stared in horrified shock, then a wave of nausea curdled her insides as she realised the meaning. Oh, Feroze, not you. Not the kindest man of all. Seeking, ever seeking to know God. Even as she watched, the bowl cracked and the water ran away. It sizzled on the floorboards, as if they were hot. It couldn’t be her fault, surely. Her mind refused to work.
The thumping at the door was deafening. The room shuddered under the blow. The door burst into shards of wood. A rain of splinters, she thought. How funny. The bed rocked and scraped across the floor. Men pushed their way in: Jet, his dark eyes savage with the triumph of the hunt, then three other men, armsmen, their swords drawn.
Maybe Elmar and Dibble are safe. They didn’t sink. Maybe for them, the painting worked. Maybe.
“Kill her,” said Jet, in his own tongue.
Harkel Tallyman had said that too. Last time she’d run, and escaped. This time there was nowhere to go. And the room was stifling. As if it would burst into flames any moment. The air could have been a blast from a furnace.
“My lord, are you sure?” one of the men asked. He swallowed uneasily and glanced at the armsman next to him. “She’s all yours,” he muttered.
She looked—almost dreamily—across to her pack. Thank goodness she had stuffed the waterpainting, the one Russet had done to control her future, into the bag Dibble had taken.
None of the Verdigris family must see that, she thought, but was no longer sure why. She began to cough. Why is it so hot? They wanted to kill her, just like Harkel. Simply because she lived. They didn’t need any other reason.
The men in front were looking at one another in dismay. Jet snatched up the painting she had just done, stared at it and then thrust it into his pocket. “Get on with it!” he growled at one of the others. “Let’s finish this so we can get to the old man.”
She understood the words but couldn’t move. Where to go anyway? Under the bed, like a frightened mouse? Try to open the window before they stopped her—and then what? Dive to the ground from the second floor? Hardly. Fight? She had no weapons, nothing but the hope that Russet’s past waterpainting power might protect her. Perhaps.
The second armsman came towards her, his sword raised. She didn’t move, so he put the point to her throat.
“Do it,” Jet said coldly.
Terelle stared at the owner of the sword, meeting his gaze with her own. “Can you?” she asked, her voice thready with terror.
The point of the sword wobbled. The man started sweating. His breathing speeded up, yet he still didn’t drive home the point.
“Oh, for crying out loud,” Jet said. “Let me do it.” He drew a dagger from his belt.
Relieved, the man with the sword dropped the point away from her throat and stepped back, seized by a bout of coughing.
She started to laugh. “That’s right. Kill me. If you can.” She wasn’t sure if it was bravado or hysteria. “By the way,” she said, hoisting her pack onto her back, “I think the house is on fire, don’t you?”
Elmar and Dibble and the four pedes swept around the corner of the stables. There was no sign of any of the Verdigris family. The smell of smoke was everywhere.
Good, Dibble thought. Being waterlords, they would be busy with the fire. Terelle, thank you. Your magic is keeping us safe so far.
The Khromatians battering at the stable door whirled to face them in shock. The pedes plunged into their midst, knocking men aside, trampling them. In the mêlée, Elmar wielded his sword, slashing at anybody in range. Pede feelers whipped the air to rip anything they hit with their serrated edges. One moment a Khromatian was hurling a spear, the next the skin opened up on his face like fruit peel and the spear was knocked off course by the flailing feeler.
Dibble drew rein in front of the stable so abruptly the pede segments compacted with an audible clatter. He snatched at the saddle handle to prevent himself from being flung to the ground. The stable door, made of thick boards, was partially staved in and the gap was defended by the spears of the Alabasters inside. Dibble found himself looking in on the men he had come to rescue, his heart racing.
“Briass,” he yelled, naming the first man he identified, “quick! Grab a couple of bridles and get out here, up on the pedes.”
They didn’t wait for a second invitation. Briass unblocked what was left of the door and four men emerged, one of them wounded.
“No one else?” Dibble asked, his heart sinking to see so few. Briass, Dondon, Carventer and
the lad everyone called Saltlip because he had a downy white moustache.
“Dead,” Briass said. He always had been laconic.
“So is Feroze.”
Briass swore but didn’t waste time. With Dondon’s help, he hoisted Carventer, who had a wounded leg, onto the spare pede, then casually speared a Khromatian who came barrelling towards them with a roar of anger. Saltlip scrambled up behind Dibble; Dondon and Briass bracketed Carventer. Dibble undid the leading rein and tossed it to Briass. Fixing the bridles they’d grabbed would have to wait.
“Lord Terelle?” Briass asked.
“Explain later!” Dibble was already prodding at his pede with the butt-end of a spear. Dondon kicked out at another Khromatian, who had recovered from his surprise enough to climb the mounting handles of the pede, and his boot heel snapped a couple of teeth. Saltlip launched a spear that pierced a man through the thigh. Dibble grinned. They were giving these spitless bastards a beating. The joy of battle was on him. He was invincible. He looked around for someone else to hit.
Instead, he spotted Elmar on the other side of the yard, pulling his pede around in a tight circle. The pede, goaded by pokes of the prod, beat the air with its feelers, mowing down any man who hadn’t thrown himself flat to the cobbles. Several spears were launched at him from further away, but they all bounced harmlessly off the pede carapace. With an odd breathless regret, Dibble was reminded they had to get out of there. When Elmar’s pede flowed past him, heading for the river, he prodded his mount after it. They headed straight for the meanders marked by a band of trees growing thickly along the banks.
“Will we be followed?” Saltlip asked Dibble.
“Don’t know. Not yet, I think. The waterlords will be busy with the—”
Even as he spoke, something swooshed over their heads and they were sprayed with droplets of moisture. By the time they looked up, there was nothing to be seen. “Busy with the fire,” Dibble finished. “Reckon they’re taking water out of the river.”
They looked back at the house. The fire at the front had been doused but flames burst through the roof towards the back, and a gyre of sparks spiralled into the sky.
“Serves you right, Bice,” Elmar said grimly. “And Feroze, we’ll remember you. You didn’t deserve to die in such a godless place.”
Oh salted wells, Dibble thought, thinking of the fire. Terelle’s at the back of the house.
Some time later they pulled up among the trees. Elmar peered down at the river sliding slickly through the gloom in near silence. Sunlord be withered. Why couldn’t the Khromatians give some of this water to the Quartern, blast them?
He pointed further to the north. “Look, up there it widens out. Shouldn’t be so deep.”
“What are we waiting for, then?” Dondon asked. “I want to be going home!” Briass nodded and urged their mount upstream along the bank.
“I’ll be pissing wilted,” Saltlip muttered, echoing Dibble’s thought. “All that water going to waste. Just… flowing away. And the pedes are going to get wet?”
Elmar, who had seen the rush down a drywash often enough, was not so impressed. “If that’s what it takes. But I don’t want them to spook.” He paused, then asked, “Dibs, are you feeling anything… odd, at the moment?”
“You mean, like…” His voice trailed away as he tried to find the words. “Strange.”
“Yes.”
“All I can think about at the moment is getting back to Samphire.”
Elmar heaved a disgusted sigh. “So it’s not just me. I was right—That sun-shrivelled idiot of a woman.”
Dibble’s eyes widened. “You mean…? Waterful mercy. Terelle painted us there?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“But—but how can we follow her, if…?”
He left the words unspoken, but Elmar heard them anyway: if we feel like this? If we have this ache in the gut, this pressure on the heart, this overwhelming desire to be somewhere else? No, not a desire. A drive. Like a desperate thirst. He could no more have resisted it than he could have stopped breathing. Whether he liked it or not, they were heading towards Samphire, and they were going to do it as quickly as they possibly could.
“We’ll come back, I swear it,” he said to Dibble.
“But she…” Dibble looked back at the house, now just a distant glow on a knoll. “Watergiver help us, that’s why she made me bring the pack. She knew.”
Elmar nodded. “She made it that way.”
Saltlip, following the conversation without really understanding, asked, “Ye’re talking about Lord Terelle? She’s not alone. Lord Russet is with her.”
Elmar grunted. “Might as well sprinkle salt in the sea for all the use he’ll be. She’s on her own, and there is nothing any of us can do about it, because you Alabasters can’t stay either. You stand out amongst these brown-skins like a white pede in a Reduner meddle. There is no way you could follow her.” He prodded the pede to set it in motion after the others. “We have to head to the White Quarter fast, but first we have to take on board as much water as we can. And fix on the bridles.”
Where the river widened, it was only knee-deep for most of the way across, with one deep channel that wasn’t wide enough to worry a pede. They paused in the shallow part to encourage the animals to drink as much as they could hold. When Dibble opened up his pack, he found three water skins—Terelle had packed not only his, but Elmar’s and her own. Saltlip had his because he always wore it. The others had left theirs in the barracks, but Elmar had picked up three of them.
“We are going to need more water,” Dondon said morosely.
“We have one set of panniers,” Elmar said.
“Take out the blankets and cloaks. The blankets we can sit on. The cloaks we can wear.”
While the men filled the panniers, Dibble examined the contents of his pack. “Two palmubras, squashed. Skin paste to prevent sunburn on the salt. One bag of dried bab fruit. One knife. And a painting. Two tinderboxes with flints. Three candles. One bowl. Some leather strips to mend broken tackle or sandals or whatever. Some twine. That’s it.”
“What’s the painting?” Elmar asked.
“Can’t see in this light.”
“She’s given us the one Russet did,” Elmar said, with certainty. “So the Verdigris don’t take a better look at it.”
“You reckon she knows we’ll come back?”
Elmar gave a harsh laugh. “She knows. Tell me, do you want to go back to Lord Jasper without her and tell him what happened?”
“Not weeping likely!”
“Exactly. She knows. Tell you one thing, unless we can spear some birds on the way back, we’re going to be very hungry by the time we get to Mine Sylvine. That bab fruit goes to the pedes. Now fill those water skins and drink as much of this river as you can get down your gullet without throwing it back up again, because water is going to be in short supply too.”
With that dour remark, Elmar picked up the bowl and went to top up the panniers now that the men had replaced them on one of the pedes. Every drop was going to count.
Terelle, he thought, when I see you again, I’m going to wring your neck. Couldn’t you have thought of a better way of saving our worthless hides?
If she survived this, Terelle knew she would look back on it and wonder if she’d been more than a little mad. Out of the tangle of emotions and regrets and fears, a thought emerged that was as coherent as it was pointless: the imminent prospect of death fries your brain. You can’t cope with the idea that in a heartbeat you’ll be dead, so you waste precious time thinking things that don’t matter…
“I really do think the house is on fire,” she said as Jet grabbed her. “See the smoke? It’s seeping up through the floor. Which is rather hot. Don’t you think we ought to leave here and go downstairs?”
Jet pressed the point of his weapon into her throat, but his fingers trembled and he didn’t seem able to force it home. The tip barely broke her skin.
“Honestly, I don’t think you
can kill me,” she said, her confidence growing. For the first time, she was grateful for Russet’s painting of her. “Do you?”
He tried then. The effort to ram the point into her jugular shook his body, but nothing happened.
“My lord!” one of the men cried. “She’s right. The floor is burning!”
The men backed out of the room, coughing, jostling their way through the door. Jet looked around, confused. The dagger point dropped away from her throat, so she grabbed up Russet’s plaid from the bed and held it over her mouth and nose as she headed for the door and the smoke thickened. Jet started coughing then as well, and grabbed her arm, digging his fingers in. She tried to pull herself free, but he was far too strong. He pushed her from the room, shoving her and roughly scraping her arm on the door frame. She yelped, furious. He took no notice. In the passage much of the smoke was coming from the direction of the main staircase, so he turned the opposite way. His men had already gone.
“Russet,” she said urgently, her eyes streaming. “In the next room!”
“Who cares? I was supposed to kill him too.” He dragged her in his wake, her arm gripped tight.
As they passed Russet’s door she lowered the plaid to scream with all the volume she could muster. “Russet! Fire, fire! Get out of there!” In the distance she could hear similar cries. What’s the matter with him? How can he sleep through all this?
Jet tugged at her and she struggled against him. When he pulled her onwards, she bit his hand, ripping into his flesh savagely until she tasted the tang of blood. He slapped her face, hard, the blow making her ears ring. She pounded his nose, then pulled his hair. His eyes teared.
He hauled her up until her face was level with his. “I may not be able to kill you, but I still have my dagger, and I’ll cut your tits off if you try any more of that. Understand me?”
Wracked with coughing, she couldn’t struggle any more, or reply. She covered her nose with the plaid, then once again she was running after him, hauled along in his grip. When they reached the head of the narrow back stairs, they were slowed by a rush of six or seven servants and orderlies coming from the opposite direction to use the staircase. For a moment the smoke thinned out and she looked back the way they had come.