The Last Stormlord

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Scarpen Quarter Scarcleft City Level 36 A few weeks before her eighteenth birthday, Terelle was buying water from Vato when a man raced past and almost knocked her water jars flying. Several armed men pounded after him, followed a moment or two later by riders on a myriapede. The driver and those seated behind him were zigtube-wearing enforcers.

"What is all that about, at this time of the morning?" Terelle asked Vato, grateful that she had saved the jars from being smashed.

"There's a lot of raids lately. Be careful, lass. That fleeing man was Wilsent the beggar from Dung Street. He's a water thief. Used to be a beggar on the uplevels, but they've got a lot stricter now. It's hard to even go upwards any more, let alone beg there." He frowned unhappily. "And water goes up in price again tomorrow."

"Not again! Why?"

"Not enough water coming in from the Warthago Range, why else? Same old story: Highlord Taquar says the Cloudmaster isn't making enough rain. That he's old and dying." He shrugged. "But he's been dying for the past four years or more. People say Highlord Taquar has to do something because he's the heir, you know. The Quartern heir. Did you know that? Granthon announced it ages back. What nobody cares about is that we waterless are always the first to suffer. After the cats, that is." He spat, shedding his own water to show the depth of his contempt.

"Cats?"

"People don't keep pets when times are bad."

She thought about that. It had been a long time since she had seen a cat. The idea that people killed their cats rather than feed them, or worse, that they killed them for the cupful of water they could obtain if they took the body to one of the houses of the dead for water extraction, appalled her more than anything else he'd said. She felt ill, sick in the stomach and heartsick in spirit.

"And if the Cloudmaster does die?" she asked at last.

"Who knows? We are taught that we owe everything to stormlords. That without them, there would be no water. If that's true, and we've only got one stormlord now-which is definitely true-I think we could all be in trouble before much longer. But, Terelle, it may all be a lie. After all, what better way to stay in power than to tell everyone that they get their water because of you? Seems a mighty clever way to rule to me."

She stared at him in horror. "Surely no one can think the Cloudmaster lies!"

He shrugged. "The waterpriests say the rainlords are the living proof that the Sunlord exists and aids us. People who believe them bow low to the rainlords. But me? I reckon Highlord Taquar has a nasty smell to his water. There's not much holy about that wilted bastard. And if you tell anyone I said that, I'm dead, lass."

He hawked and spat yet again. "Withering lords. Grind us down into the dust of the Scarpen, while they live in their fancy uplevel houses and drink all the water they want. If I had my way, I'd slit all their throats. Then we'd find out, wouldn't we?"

Terelle tried to suppress her unease.

"Don't look so worried!" He grinned at her. "You're coated with dew, you are! Because of that old man you've hooked up with. Never short of tokens to buy water, you are!"

She reddened at the insinuation behind his words, but resisted the temptation to deny what he had not openly said. "Russet says that in troubled times people are less likely to buy artwork, and it's true, I think. Especially ones that use water. Lately we've been getting less work."

"Eh, I heard tell he did one for the Cloudmaster himself!"

"Yes, but that was ages ago."

He turned away to serve Ba-ba and she plodded her way upstairs lugging the water jars and wondering about her life. She hated the unfairness of the idea that she could one day be struggling with water problems again.

This was her fourth year with Russet, and the old man had finally done what he had promised: he had taught her how to paint. In addition, she had learned nearly all there was to know about making the paints. She knew where to procure the ingredients, how to grind them and mix them and add the resins and additives that made waterpainting possible. She knew all the tricks of what Russet called artistry: perspective, depth, foreshortening, texture, shadow. The sort of things anyone could learn. But she was aware, too, that she had something that he could never have taught her. She could do more than reproduce the reality of a scene in paint; she could suggest the feel and movement, the smell and mood of it as well. Just as Russet could. Painting was a joyous thing, a whole experience, not just the layering of colour on water. It was better than dancing had ever been. She could no longer imagine a life without it.

But one thing Russet had never shown her: how to make a suggestion of a painted figure change the way he had done that first day.

More to the point, was he ever going to tell her? After all, he'd never explained how he had known her name. She'd asked-no, begged-him to tell her who she was, but his reply was always the same: "When I be ready."

At first she had been both defiant and persistent, threatening to leave him, but her arguments with the old man always had the same result: she ended up in the outhouse, throwing up her last meal, doubled over with cramp. For days afterwards she would feel listless.

The sharp-eyed Lilva had cornered her about it one day. She had been fifteen at the time. "You got a young'un in your baby jar that's making you sick, have you, love?" she asked.

Terelle, blushing, denied it.

"Ah, then maybe you have one of them delicate stomachs that don't like arguments," she said with a derisive snort. "Specially arguments you'll never win. That old man? He's pure poison, child. The more you defy him, the more his eyes glint with the joy of battle. But you? You just get sick to the stomach."

Terelle had dismissed the idea as fanciful at the time, but now, when she thought about it, she wondered if Lilva was right. Defying Russet did seem to upset her stomach, which was infuriating and such a stupid weakness to have when he so often annoyed her.

She bit her lip as another nagging thought niggled at her. That first waterpainting she had seen Russet do… the confused expression on the face of the woman, as if she'd stepped out of the house without knowing why. As if she had been compelled…

Compelled. Could Russet force someone to do something simply by painting them doing it?

No, of course not. The idea was preposterous. And he couldn't make her sick simply by arguing with her, either. Besides, she was sometimes sick like that when she hadn't been arguing with him. Why, she'd been sick just the other day, when she had been doing nothing more than daydreaming about going to Breccia City or Denmasad or somewhere to be a waterpainter there, all on her own…

That memory trailed away and was replaced by another: the time she had seen Russet painting in the middle of the night. She frowned uneasily as she stowed the day-jars, not liking the way her mind seemed to be drifting.

"I be going uplevel now," Russet said. He wound his coloured cloth around his bald head and tucked in the ends. "To collect a debt owed for a painting. Ye can make stew for dinner."

She nodded and started to gather the ingredients as he left the room and set off along the hallway. Even though her mind wasn't on the task, it didn't take long before she had the pot hanging on the hook over a low-burning fire. She continued to think about the painting she had seen him do in secret, when he'd thought she was asleep.

Once the stew was gently simmering, she studied the room. There weren't many places to hide anything, let alone something as large as a painting severed from its water. She knew it wasn't under his pallet because she always moved it to sweep. The only other place it would fit was under the box where the seaweed briquettes were kept.

Carefully, she took out all the briquettes and lifted the woven box from its corner. Ten or so paintings lay flat underneath. Her hands trembled as she carried them to the table.

They were all pictures of her. Several portrayed the girl she had been when she'd first come to live on the thirty-sixth level, showing her right here in this room or out in the hallway. In one of them she was doing a waterpainting, in another she was eating at the table, in a third she was pounding something up to make paint-powder. Because they looked so much like moments she had known, she assumed he must have done them from memory.

Other paintings showed her older, year by year, doing similar things, still living in this same building. Then there were three sheets portraying her at an age she had not yet reached. She looked in bewilderment at these versions of herself. In one, she was mounted on a pede, and the land the animal was crossing was pure white. The White Quarter, perhaps? She'd heard there was a place called the Whiteout, where the soil was as white as salt. Strapped behind her was a bundle of what looked to be Russet's clothes.

In another painting, she was in a camp, and Russet's belongings were strewn around her feet on that white soil.

In the third, she was standing on some kind of green plants, and there was water-water exposed to full sunlight-sliding in profligate abandon across the green. She gasped to see even a painted depiction of so much waste. In the background, the land tilted, ending in jagged shapes of blue and purple. The picture was the imaginings of a fever dream, surely, not reality.

Yet when she touched the paint, an overwhelming desire to be there, in that place, uncurled inside her, until she was gasping from a need she could not understand. The desire wasn't hers; she was sure it wasn't. I don't want it. And if it wasn't hers, it had to be his.

That was the moment, with cold clarity, that she began to make sense of it all. Terror ripped through her then, tearing all her peace of mind apart. She skimmed through the paintings again, staring, shaking, not believing, grasping a thought only to lose it again when it seemed too unbelievable to be true.

And always, always that memory she had: the woman stepping out into the street as if she had been compelled to do so. Compelled, because he had painted her there. Another memory: she had been uncertain after she had first met him whether she should take up his offer-until a day or two had passed, when she had become certain.

She knew then what had been done to her, and it was unspeakable. Those early portraits had not been painted from memory at all. He had done them before she had agreed to become his apprentice, not afterwards. He made my future by painting it.

She let the paintings fall from nerveless fingers and could not bring herself to touch them again. She sank down onto the chair and sat huddled there, not moving.

That was the way Russet found her several runs of the sandglass later.

He glanced at her, then at the paintings lying where she had dropped them. "So now ye know," he said.

She struggled to sit straight, to contain the rawness of her emotions, her rage. "What have you done?" she asked. But she knew. In her heart, she knew.

"Trapped ye," he said. His complacency was both chilling and streaked through with a gloating malice. "For y'own good. Y'future be painted, and ye never be changing it. If ye be wise, ye'll not struggle against it, because will get ye nowhere. Ye cannot leave me."

"And what is my future?" she asked in a whisper. "What life have you decided I must live?"

He smiled. "That is for you to find out by living it."

Oh, Sunlord help me, she thought. She had believed she'd escaped an unwanted future when she'd left the snuggery. Now the menace of it was back, lying in wait, inevitable in its arrival, unchangeable, its outcome unknowable-at least to her.

"No!" She jumped up, snatched the heap of paintings and leaped for the fireplace. He moved faster than she thought possible. As she went to fling all the paintings into the fire, he struck downwards across her forearms, sending the sheets scattering across the floor instead.

"Ye'll die!" he cried, panting. "That be y'future, ye silly frip. Burn them, and ye'll be burning with them!"

Terelle stood, her hands dropping to her sides, her passion draining away.

"And ye already know, I think: fighting a painted future means ye'll be ill."

She began to weep, the tears born not of defeat but of fury.