Stormlord rising

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

White Quarter The Whiteout and Mine Silverwall Terelle awoke knowing everything was wrong. It was night, that much was certain. Overhead the Star River shone in a brilliant band across the depths of the black sky. And she couldn't move.

Panic, urgent and futile, drove out thought. She lay on her back, head higher than her feet, her body firmly bound. Turning her head was possible, but nothing else. Yet she was… shifting. At speed. She could feel the wind on her face, whipping at her hair. The swishing sound of movement filled the air around her.

In fear, her heart hammered against her ribs. She struggled, wanting to sit up, but her bonds wouldn't allow it. Tiny pricks spattered softly at her face; when she licked her lips, they were covered in fine salt.

On her left, a shape loomed, gliding, keeping pace, a ghostly silver outline against the starlit salt. She lifted her head and strained to see better. A white pede, legs moving in waves like a curtain in the wind. The driver stood on its back, holding the reins in one hand, long prod in the other, perfectly balanced. An Alabaster: white-skinned, flowing white hair, silvered now to blend in with his world. But she was not high on a pede's back. She was gliding as smoothly as a hawk on the wind, yet she was only a couple of hand-spans away from the salt of the Whiteout.

She turned her head to the other side. Another similar pede and driver, only this pede trailed a rectangular shape. A litter, that's what it looked like. Front shafts tied to the rear of the pede, the back set with small wheels.

Her fear dampened and she began to think again. Alabasters, Watergiver be thanked, not Reduners. Russet. That had to be Russet, tied just as she was. They were being drawn over the surface of salt. She remembered now. Alabasters had given her water, smeared her skin with some kind of ointment. They must have tied her to the litter so she wouldn't fall off. She lay back, tired, wondering drowsily if they had drugged her. Never mind, she'd worry about it all later. She closed her hurting eyes and drifted pleasantly away. A long time afterward Terelle awoke again, in a tent.

The sides were rolled up, and it was bright daylight outside. And hot. Stifling. Beneath her was the softness of a quilt placed on colorful carpeting. For a moment she stared, wondering why the woven patterns of that carpet seemed familiar. As soon as she stirred to take a better look, someone came to her side to offer her a water skin. A tall Alabaster woman, dressed in the white clothing of her people, she was one of the largest women Terelle had ever seen. The cloth of her robe, adorned with tiny mirrors and red embroidery on the front panels, strained to contain the abundance of her buttocks, the unusual breadth of her hips and the solid bulge of her breasts. Even her long white hair, braided in a single plait that reached her waist, was copious. Not a young woman, Terelle decided; her face was meshed with the lines of age.

"I'm Errica," she said, "the physician of our mine."

Terelle made no sense of that, but nodded anyway. "Terelle," she said. "From Scarcleft." Her lips hurt when she spoke. They had been rubbed with pede fat, but were still cracked and sore. She drank, long and deep draughts. Vaguely she remembered waking earlier to drink, several times. "Russet?"

"Pardon?"

"The old man."

"Ah. He's very ill. Scorpion sting. We're treating that, but it has poisoned his system. He may not live."

"Oh." She tried to think about that, but her thoughts kept slipping away.

Errica smiled in understanding, and did not press her to talk. Instead she helped her to drink some more, to eat some food, and showed her where she could relieve herself. Then she left her alone again. Terelle dozed.

The next time she awoke, perhaps a couple of runs of the sandglass later, she felt almost normal. Errica, sitting cross-legged on the carpet at her side, was mending a tear in an Alabaster robe. She laid that aside as soon as she saw Terelle was awake.

"Feel like getting up now?" she asked. "I have a clean robe for ye to be wearing-one of our own, if ye don't mind that. At least it isn't stiff with salt like your own clothes."

"Thank you. That'd be wonderful." Terelle struggled to her feet, wincing. All her muscles ached.

"When we get to the mine, there might be enough water to be washing clothes," Errica added. "We'll see."

"Where are we now?"

"We were traveling east from Mine Emery on our way to Mine Silverwall, when we saw your fire. We detoured a bit to be picking ye up and then camped here this morning to be giving the pedes a rest. We will start traveling again soon, once evening brings the cool air. We should be reaching Mine Silverwall by tomorrow morning."

"Mine? Oh, salt mines! You-you went out of your way to find us? Thank you. You saved my life. Maybe Russet's as well."

"Ye should never take a black pede onto the salt, you know. The black color absorbs the reflected heat from the salt as well as the direct heat of the sun. Their blood boils."

Terelle shuddered, chastened. "I didn't know that." But I did guess Russet didn't know what he was doing.

The woman indicated some clothing laid on the carpeting. "Get dressed now, while I get my husband; he wants to speak to ye."

She rolled down the sides of the tent, then left and did not return until Terelle had dressed in the heavy robe with its intricate pattern of inlaid mirror discs, each a bevel-edged circle about the size of a man's fingernail. Perhaps in the interests of comfort, the mirrors were confined to the front and sleeves of the garment. The weight of it pulled at her neck.

When Errica returned, she was not alone. She indicated the tall, serious-faced man who ducked his head to follow her into the tent. "Messenjer," she said. "Manager of Emery. My husband."

"Happy to be seeing ye awake and refreshed, child. We're gratified to be of assistance, especially to Watergiver lords." He indicated the carpet with a wave of his hand. "Shall we sit?"

Annoyed at being called a child, Terelle sat, imitating his cross-legged posture. Errica lowered herself with surprising suppleness, given her large size.

"Lords? Russet, you mean?" She considered that. "I suppose he is a lord in Khromatis."

He laughed. "Yes, indeed. Who else would dress in that fashion, all wrapped up in cloth like a colorful parcel? Who else would carry waterpaints but Watergivers? We have the things ye left near your dead pede, by the way, including the paints."

"Oh." Her heart sank. She had not left her choices behind her after all. "Thank you. That was kind." How does he know about waterpaints? And how does he know what lords wear in Khromatis? She struggled to make her sluggish mind move. And why did he sound vaguely like Russet? The way he spoke. Saying ye instead of you, the heavy accent, the slightly odd way of using words. Russet, of course, didn't speak the language of the Quartern very well, and these people did, yet there was something… similar.

"And ye. Are ye not also a lord of Khromatis? A Watergiver from across the borderland marshes?"

"No. To me a Watergiver is the emissary of the Sunlord." Then she added doubtfully, "You do worship the Sunlord as Scarpen folk do, don't you?"

"No, indeed we don't! A Scarperman fallacy, that. We believe in God, certainly; God the Only, but He is just that: God. No more, no less. We don't worship Watergivers, either. Watergivers are mortal people, for all they're much blessed by God. We're the Guardians. Don't ye know this?" He looked at her, puzzled. "But why do ye ask questions of our faith? Surely it's known to ye! And what were ye doing out on the salt with a black pede?"

She let her confusion about his beliefs slide and said, "We lived in the Scarpen, but the old man wanted to go home to the place he calls Khromatis. He's my great-grandfather and says he's one of the Watergivers."

Messenjer blinked, his face blank. "And ye are not?"

"I was born in the Gibber."

"Ah."

The silence that followed dragged on until Terelle began to feel embarrassed.

"Well," Messenjer remarked at last, "it'll be many weeks before your Russet is able to be journeying again, if he survives. Ye're welcome to be staying with us in the meantime, of course."

"That-that's very generous."

Errica smiled at her. "Your people are our responsibility. How can we not treat ye with honor?" Messenjer made an abrupt movement of his hand, as if to tell her not to say anything else.

But what she'd said made no sense to Terelle. Alabasters certainly weren't related to Watergivers; they looked nothing alike, for all the echo of similarity in their speech. And how could Alabasters be responsible for another people who lived elsewhere?

She said, selecting her words carefully, "I'd like to know more about Watergivers, if you can tell me."

They exchanged worried looks.

"I don't know my own history," she explained. "I am Gibber born and Scarpen bred. I don't even know what-who-Watergivers are. The only Watergiver I ever knew about, until I met Russet, was raised into the glory of eternal sunfire and sits at the side of the Sunlord. He once dwelt with men, and taught the rainlords and stormlords all they know about stormshifting and cloudbreaking." She was reciting words she had heard from street preachers. Once she had been confident of their truth; now the words sounded oddly hollow and pretentious.

Messenjer frowned, but all he said was, "Ah." He and Errica swapped another look, this one laden with warning, then he added, "I'll give it some thought. We don't tell our history to outsiders lightly. And it seems ye may be that."

"Perhaps if ye were to be telling us about yourself?" Errica suggested. "It may help us to be making a decision."

A decision on how much I should know. They still sounded friendly, but she'd felt a slight decrease in warmth nonetheless, replaced by a more studied formality. She repressed a sigh. If she was to cope with the danger of her future, she needed to know as much as possible. If these people could tell her something, anything, then it was worth an honest recital of her past. "Of course," she said.

It took her half the run of a sandglass, but at the end of that time, they knew her history: how she had been born to Sienna, Russet's granddaughter, how she had grown up in the Gibber and then at Opal's Snuggery in Scarcleft, how she had met Russet and been trained as a waterpainter. Fearful of being disbelieved, she said nothing of the power present in the waterpainter's art, nor how Russet had used it against her. She described her meeting with Shale, her imprisonment by Highlord Taquar Sardonyx and how she had fled. Once again she omitted to tell the whole truth, remarking merely that she had used the damage created by the earthquake to escape. Other than that, she painted Russet with words exactly as she saw him-the manipulative murderer of her father. She'd have to be sun-fried crazy before she'd make him sound like a man of integrity.

When she finished, Messenjer and Errica exchanged yet another glance. Terelle was becoming more than irritated by their silent conversation of meaningful looks.

"Thank ye for telling us," Messenjer said. "I think we need to be consulting others back in Samphire about this. In the meantime, we must start this caravan moving now, if we're to be arriving in Mine Silverwall in the cool of the morning. We'll put Russet back on the sledge, but ye can ride up behind our daughter-in-law. When we arrive in Silverwall, we'll talk about these other things some more."

It was a dismissal of a kind, and Terelle had to swallow it, along with her irritation. "Can I see Russet now?" she asked.

Errica smiled, as if relieved this question was one she could answer. "Of course, if ye want, but don't expect too much. He's an old man, and he'll not be walking anywhere for a long, long time." By the time they rode on, Terelle had met all of the party: Messenjer and Errica's two ghostly-pale sons, Cullet and Sardi; Cullet's wife Delissal, a woman of about forty, with a face like a block of salt, dirty white and angular; and two other men who were apparently servants of some kind. Terelle shared a mount with Delissal and as they rode the woman taught her some of the finer points of pede driving.

She squirmed under the Alabaster's critical regard, which manifested itself in a mixture of amazement and self-righteous tolerance. Whenever Terelle admitted her ignorance of any facet of White Quarter life, Delissal would throw her hands up in the air, utter an amazed "Oh, my!" and proceed to do her best to dispel such ignorance.

Russet, pulled behind Cullet's myriapede, slept. Offered food and water, he took it, but gave little other sign of animation and had to be cleaned like a baby. He did not recognize Terelle when she spoke to him.

She found it difficult to care.

Just at dawn, they reached the rim of Mine Silverwall. It was early morning, and the shadows were long. Her first impression was of a hole opening up in front of them, dark and deep. Vast enough to have held half of Scarcleft, it was not yet lit by the sun's rays so it took her a moment to understand what she was seeing. Not only were the salt mines dug into the ground, but so were the houses.

Three steep-sided walls descended in giant steps to the bottom of a quarry. Each of these walls was pitted with entrances; some were doorways or windows giving out onto a ledge, others were more like cavern openings. The fourth side of the quarry was a slope with a zigzag road accessing every level on its way down into the depths, far, far below.

"Why not just take the salt on the surface?" she asked Delissal, puzzled.

The woman seemed distracted as she answered. "Surface salt is just granules, bulky and difficult to transport. Further down it's compacted, so we just have to cut the blocks…"

Her voice trailed away and Terelle realized there was something wrong. Everyone was still sitting on their mounts at the top of the slope, not moving, their bloodless faces blank of expression. "What is it?" she asked.

"Where are the pedes? Where are the people?"

The unspoken horror behind the words scared Terelle.

Next to them, Cullet slid down to the ground. "Terelle," he said quietly, "get down, please."

When she obeyed he held out the reins to his pede for her to hold. "Wait here." Wordlessly she did as he asked and he mounted behind his wife. Messenjer had already jabbed his pede with his prod and the beast was flowing down the slope in fast mode. He took the first of the ledges to the right and rode halfway along to a doorway. The others followed, almost as fast. Terelle, left alone with Russet, went to his side. He was conscious, so she gave him a drink.

"Where?" he asked.

"One of their salt mines," she answered. "Silverwall."

"Not dying," he said. "Not in this waterless hell. Be going home, we two."

"Khromatis is not my home," she said, trying to be glad he recognized her now.

Leaving him, she tied the pede's antennae together and walked down the slope to the first ledge, taking the left-hand side in the opposite direction to the others. The first doorway she reached was hung with a curtain made of beads of rock salt threaded on red-dyed flax string. She pulled the curtain aside and looked in. It wasn't a cave, but a room carved out of the ground, with more rooms beyond. A house. The first room contained a fireplace and an oven, table, chairs, benches. She called out, and when no one replied she took a step inside, peering around at the rock walls.

No, she thought, not rock. Salt.

The furniture, solid and chunky, was sculpted out of the rock-hard salt. Shelves were incised into the walls, but much of what had been kept there was now broken on the floor or tossed aside, as if it had been pillaged. Picture-reliefs engraved on blank spaces glistened in the dim light, telling stories new to her. An oil lamp hung from the ceiling but it wasn't lit and felt cold to the touch of her fingers.

She shivered.

"Hello?" she called again. "Anyone here?"

There was no reply. It was eerily still. Although she had not long stepped through the bead curtain, it now hung without a shiver. Spooked, her feet leaden, she walked further in to peer into the room beyond. There was a woman there, lying on a solid divan of salt strewn with rugs. Her white robe was rucked up over her head, and her bloated, shapeless legs were sprawled apart and bloodied. There was dried blood everywhere, pale pinkish blood: on the walls, the floor, the bedding. A lingering smell, sour and unpleasant, hung in the air.

Terelle hastily clamped a hand over her mouth and backed out of the room, her heart now pumping fiercely enough for her to feel it in her throat.

She leaned against the wall next to the stove. Deep breaths, take deep breaths…

Time dragged, mired in these deaths, in what they meant. Reminding her of other deaths she had never wanted to think of again. But this wasn't an earthquake. This was murder.

She unpeeled herself from the wall and forced herself to look into the third of the rooms. Two children huddled together on the floor, plump little hands clutching each other. Their bodies ended at the neck, a coagulation of mess and bone-and then nothing.

Their heads weren't in the house. She looked. Terelle sat on the ledge with her back to the outer wall of the house, and watched the sun climb up over the rim of the mine. Messenjer and the others had dismounted and were running-running up and down the ladders that connected the different levels, calling out to one another, checking, checking, checking. Trying to find just one person alive. Just one.

It seemed a long time before they gathered together in front of one of the mine entrances and beckoned Terelle to join them. Errica had collapsed onto the rung of one of the ladders. She looked ill and her breasts heaved as she tried to catch her breath.

"We'll stay here a day or two," Messenjer told Terelle, his voice harsh and cold. "Long enough to bury the dead. Then we will ride for Mine Emery."

"There's-there's no one?" No one alive?

He shook his head. "Some missing. The best of our youth. They must have taken them for slaves. It's not unusual with Reduners. This is the first time we've seen them so deep into the Whiteout, though."

"Reduners did this? There were two children back there. Scarcely old enough to walk. One clutched a toy in his hand… but they… they didn't have any heads. Why would they do that?"

Messenjer nodded. "They want to be teaching us a lesson. This is what'll happen to us all if we resist. They want to be ruling our land, selling our salt, and giving us a few bab fruit in return. Minerals, pedes, samphire, salt, wild red flax from the marshes of the borderlands: that's all we have. The rest we buy or exchange: cloth, food, fuel, metal. We live simply, but our salt and soda, our saltpeter and gypsum, our mirrors-they're sold across the Giving Sea, as well as in the Quartern, so we survive. These Reduners would make us as poor as a Whiteout cat…"

He was rambling and seemed to realize it, so he stopped and took a deep breath. "Bring Russet down and attend to the pedes. Delissal, cook us a meal. Life must go on. The rest of us will collect the bodies… God grant them an easy crossing to the afterlife."

It was only afterward that she realized there had been tears in his eyes and on his cheeks.

Tears.

Alabasters wept water. Just as she did.