The Last Stormlord

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Scarpen Quarter Scarcleft City Level 36 After a few weeks on Level Thirty-six, Terelle knew everyone who lived or worked nearby. She and Russet lived on the upper floor of a mud-brick building. Lilva, a gaunt, mean-minded woman who rented out the sexual favours of her son and daughter, lived in the room next door. On the other side was Cilla, who wove bab-leaf sleeping mats for sale, and next to her, Rhea, the wife of a thief who was missing most of the time. Directly below them on the ground floor was old Ba-ba the humpback, bent double with swollen joints, who made and sold sinucca-leaf paste for whores-and for respectable married women, too-to prevent pregnancy. His wife, Fipiah, a buxomly handsome woman at least twenty years younger than him, was known to fix any problems that arose when the paste failed to do its job.

Sometimes she "fixed" more than she intended; twice Terelle had seen women enter Fipiah and Ba-ba's rooms only to see them leave as bodies wrapped in palm-leaf shrouds. Both times, Terelle had expected someone to make a fuss. Both times, the body was quietly carted away and nothing was said. Terelle had made sacrifices of water for their souls. It wasn't right that anyone should vanish into death without someone telling the Sunlord to look out for them on their journey to eternal life within the glory of His sunfire.

Next to Ba-ba and Fipiah, there was a family of stone-breakers who sometimes found work mending roads on the higher levels. In a lean-to in front of them was Qatoo the madman, who had a habit of stripping off all his clothes and jumping up and down on top of them, wailing, until his ten-year-old son came and led him away. The boy earned his living as a catamite for the pede grooms who lived in the stables outside the walls, men rich by the standards of the Thirty-sixth because they had regular jobs and water allocations.

The waterseller on the street outside, Vato, was the same man who had spoken to her on her first visit to the level about the cost of filling a dayjar. One of Terelle's duties now was to buy water from him every morning. She obtained the latest gossip at the same time, which she then relayed to Russet. Vato, who made daily journeys to Level One, was known as a good source of the kind of information that kept the inhabitants of Level Thirty-six alive: whether there was going to be a raid that day, perhaps, or whether the enforcers were looking for anyone in particular.

When Opal sent a party of professional searchers into the level looking for Terelle, Vato warned her they were coming. She spent three days hiding in a storeroom that Russet rented several streets away. The searchers made no less than five visits to Russet's room, two of them in the middle of the night, before they gave up. None of Russet's neighbours would admit to ever having seen Terelle, even when offered money.

"Vivie must have told Opal about you," she said to Russet. She was so annoyed with her sister that she felt like cracking a water jar over her head.

After that, Russet anonymously sent Opal water tokens every week. Vivie sent word back-in a letter addressed to Terelle at Russet's room, showing that nobody had been fooled-that the snuggery owner would be placated as long as the payments continued.

Russet smiled with smug gratification. "Ye not worth much to snuggery, eh?"

For the time being, Terelle was safe-although remembering Huckman, she avoided all caravans from the south that passed through the level. Half a year passed and for the average dweller on the thirty-sixth level, the situation worsened. Raids and arrests became a daily occurrence as laws tightened. No waterless woman was allowed to have children now; the enforcers came to every lane, dressed in their blue uniforms with a swirl of sand glued on the breast to symbolise their office, and read the proclamation. The following week they were back, scouring the streets for visibly pregnant women and demanding proof that both they and their unborn child were entitled to water allotments. If they couldn't produce proof, or if they couldn't show that they or their husband had regular employment, they were taken away.

Some never returned. Some came back the next day, pale, bleeding and no longer pregnant.

One morning, Terelle watched the husband of one such woman buying some herbs from Fipiah to stop the bleeding. Terelle said to Vato, shocked, "I saw his wife last week. She was at least two-thirds of the way into her pregnancy!"

"Yes. My wife was with her last night. Says that like as not, she'll die."

"It wasn't her fault! A woman can't always prevent a baby. I know that from the snuggery. Is it the Cloudmaster who makes such terrible laws?"

Vato shrugged. "He's certainly the one who doesn't send us enough water. But it's our very own highlord who has the decision on how to make water last. Taquar Sardonyx the Splendid, of Scarcleft City, who else?"

"Then he is wicked!"

Ba-ba, spreading his sinucca leaves to dry on his doorstep, heard her indignation and waggled a crippled finger at her. "I heard say he's been away, and it's Harkel the seneschal been runnin' things. And he's a right proper bastard, no mistake. But wicked? Are they, child? Either of 'em? Tell me this, by what right does a woman bring a child into a world when she has no water for him? That's a crime as heinous as murder, for the child is born to die-or to steal life-givin' water from someone else. You mark my words, m'dear, if folk are let do what they will, then there'll come a day when Vato here goes uplevel to find the reeves won't sell him a drop for us. Not a drop, 'cause there won't be no more water. Taquar does what he has to, and he's right. 'Tis fools like the Cloudmaster in Breccia City with their bleedin' hearts that'll bring us to a thirst that can't be quenched."

"You silly old fool," Vato told him, "one day Taquar is going to throw people like us out into the Sweepings. We're the dregs of the thirty-sixth. Who cares 'bout us?"

"They need us workers," Ba-ba protested. "We do the dirty work for 'em. The dangerous work. That's why they nivver cut off our water altogether. They could if they wanted. They could stop you from sellin' it to us, for a start!"

"Yeah, well, it might happen one day," Vato shook his head. "I've heard tell hoarding water is punishable by desert exile now, and we both know what that means."

"I don't," said Terelle.

"Dumped far out into the Sweepings or the Skirtings," Ba-ba told her. "And yesterday I saw some waterless illegals from other cities being chucked out the city gates under penalty of execution if they return. Good riddance, I say!"

Vato glared at Ba-ba, but he didn't notice. Terelle turned away abruptly. She and Russet were waterless illegals born elsewhere. True, Russet had work of sorts-he sold his paintings to uplevellers-but she didn't know if that counted as regular employment entitling him to a water allotment. Certainly he didn't collect one. She gave a worried frown as she walked up the stairs to their room.

She entered their living quarters and put the water jars into the storage slots. Russet was there at the fire, heating up some resin over burning seaweed briquettes.

"Ye go bazaar this morning," he said, not looking up from his task. "Abel the bigger's shop. Buy eight sea urchin skeletons, sort used for purple dye."

Terelle hid a sigh. She had thought her apprenticeship would start with painting; instead she laboured to produce the paints while Russet did the artwork. She had also learned that it was no use complaining, or even asking Russet what he planned for her. He told her nothing about himself, either. After the half-year she had lived with him, she knew no more than she'd told Amethyst or Vivie. He paid her an allowance, gave her food, bought her water. He gave her orders, which he expected her to obey immediately, yet he never scolded. He never had to: all he had to do was look at her with his sharp little eyes, as green as her own, to have her scurrying to do his bidding. One part of her feared him, even though he never gave her overt cause.

He had strung a curtain of bab-leaf matting across one corner of the room, given her a pallet to sleep on there, and never violated her privacy once she retreated behind the curtain. When his eyes did linger on her body, it was with a shrewd assessing look, not with lust.

And still she feared, with an uneasy, uncomfortable feeling, that all was not well. That Russet Kermes the waterpainter was not to be trusted. She hated the feeling, knowing that she should be grateful to him. He had saved her with his generosity. Why could she not like him in return? Why could she not trust him?

Always her thoughts returned to the same thing: how had he known her name?

"How much will the sea urchins be?" she asked.

"Two tinny each." He reached into his belt and extracted sufficient coins. "No paying more, although he sure to ask. Come straight back after; no loitering. Need purple for painting I make for merch on fourth level."

"Can I come with you?"

He shook his head. He had not taken her uplevel once, and she wondered if he ever would.

She said, "They say that there are enforcers on the streets looking for waterless outlanders."

His features sharpened in distaste. "Barbarians," he muttered. Once again he dug into his purse. "Here." He gave her a squashed piece of parchment, much folded and grubby about the edges.

"What is it?"

"Pass for an artisman's assistant. I bought. Anyone be stopping ye, show, yes?"

Relieved, she took the parchment, and her palmubra hat from the hook, and left the room. There was a skip in her step as she went down the stairs. She enjoyed the freedom of being out in the streets and no matter how many times she went to the bazaar, she always saw something new. Not even the thought that there might be blue-uniformed enforcers out looking for outlanders could dim her enjoyment, not with the parchment safe in her waist pouch.

The bazaar was a haphazard conglomeration of stalls, all roofed with bab-leaf thatch and separated into narrow alleyways. Goods spilled out on the ground or were stacked up to the thatching or even hung from a network of ropes that looped across the laneways. Away from the sun, it was cool and dim in the heart of the bazaar, and it was easy enough to lose one's way. The laneways smelled of spices, bab-palm oil, herbs and medicines-a tangle of odours and perfumes jostling for dominance. Gunny sacks of speckled fire-peppers, blue stamen spice, dried fruit and roots were jammed in with dried lizard skins, pebblemouse fur and fish bones. Globs of amber-coloured resin, for glues and turpentine and lacquer, were heaped up with shards of desert crystals said to cure bad luck, back ache and skin diseases.

And through it all came the sounds of stallholders enticing customers: "Look, madam, would you not like a ribbon for those lovely curls?" "Unguent to grow back hair on that bald head, merch?" "A shred of keproot to drive away your cares, broker?" "Ointment to whiten the skin, girlie?"

Terelle found Abel the bigger's stall tucked between a barber's shop and a fortune teller's. Abel sold sea produce: salted fish, pungent shrimp paste, fermented crab-meat, dried seaweed. In amongst seashells and cuttlefish skeletons-said to be nourishing food for ziggers-she found the urchins, but it took much bargaining before he would part with them for two tinnies each.

"You're from that old codger with the funny clothes, aren't you?" he asked as he wrapped the urchin shells in a yam leaf. "He's 'bout the only person who wants these things nowadays. T'other folk stopped buying frivolities like purple urchins long ago." He handed over the parcel, then exclaimed, "Lord above! What's that racket?"

Terelle turned to see. In the covered laneway between the stalls, several of the stallholders and a number of customers were trading insults with six people dressed in the robes of waterpriests.

"Good folk, make sacrifices," one of the younger priests was saying with youthful earnestness, "for if you do not return a little of your daily water to the soil, the Sunlord will surely punish you!"

The barber, a portly man with no hair at all on his head, waggled a finger at the man who had spoken. " 'S all very well for you-you're not waterless like us Thirty-sixers! Every drop we can buy is precious. We don't have any to chuck away. Water sacrifice is for the rich." He turned his head and spat into the dust.

"Hand in jar with the reeves, you wilting waterpriests," a woman agreed.

The oldest of the priests raised a hand in protest. "Madam, madam, please. We counsel you all for the good of your souls. Do not the Watergiver's writings say that 'he who shares his water with the land will live'? But it's more than that, for the Watergiver also speaks of times of drought when every man, woman and child must give water to the sun lest the Sunlord turn on them to chastise their lack of faith. And has he not turned on us, good people? Not enough rain falls in the hills-"

"Ain't that the Cloudmaster that's turned on us then?" someone called from the back of the crowd that was gathering.

There was scattered laughter.

"Go take your preaching back to those that can afford you!" someone cried.

Abel the bigger leaned forward and said quietly in Terelle's ear, "Best be gone, lass. These things have a way of turning ugly these days, alas. Neither priests nor reeves nor enforcers have many friends on the Thirty-sixth of late."

Terelle thanked him and pushed her way back to the open streets beyond. The last thing she wanted was trouble. Uneasy, she turned her thoughts to what was really bothering her: Russet. His secrecy. His refusal to tell her how he had known her name. Sands, she thought, there are no shadows in my future now. Why can't I be satisfied?

But she wasn't. That night she asked Russet yet again how he had known her name, and whether he had known her mother.

"Be not time for ye to know such things," he said.

"I need to know," she said.

His sharp little eyes glared at her. "Trust your teacher," he said.

"I'd trust him more if he told me the truth!" Infuriatingly, his next words were laced with condescension. "All in good time. When ye be older."

"I am old enough right now."

"Ye be old enough when I say so, child!"

She returned his glare with one of her own. Soft-voiced, he reminded her, "Ye can't be leaving. Nowhere to go."

The petty meanness of his statement left her furious. Trouble was, it was true. She needed him, and because of that, he could do what he pleased. She fell asleep that night thinking that her future was still a place where freedom was an illusion. All she had done was exchange a decorative cage for another, plainer one. Several hours later she woke, aware she was alone in the room. She raised herself on one elbow, not knowing what had awoken her. The door was open a crack and the sliver of light that squeezed through told her someone had lit an oil lamp in the communal hallway that ran past all the upstairs rooms. Broad and airy, it overlooked the road through a series of archways. Terelle and Russet prepared their paints there, Lilva the madam sat there when her daughter or her son brought home clients to their room, Cilla did her weaving, Rhea sewed the beadwork she sold uplevel.

Terelle peeped around the curtain to look at Russet's sleeping pallet. It was empty. She padded to the door and put her eye to the crack. He was painting by the light of a lamp, totally absorbed in what he was doing. She stood, watching him, baffled. In the dim light, she could not make out the subject matter, and in the end she returned to her bedding knowing only that this must be a painting he wanted to keep secret.

When she finally went back to sleep, she had a nightmare in which Huckman and Russet were inextricably blended into a single menacing customer of Opal's snuggery. He was demanding that Terelle be made to paint her own first-night in graphic detail. She was protesting, her terror absolute, her heart beating wildly-and then it was morning.