Stormlord Rising Page 23

  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 an
d 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.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  White Quarter

  Mine Emery

  “Ye must use your waterpainting powers,” Messenjer said, “to be saving us all.”

  Terelle, who was warming her hands by the fire that burned in Messenjer’s kitchen on Mine Emery, looked up sharply.

  They had arrived that morning, but Messenjer had been gone from the house all day, to return only with the setting of the sun. Terelle had grabbed some rest, but apparently he had not. Deep lines of exhaustion furrowed his face and reflected the pain of the conversations he must have had that day, telling his people what had happened at Mine Silverwall. In the distance, through the open doorway, she heard someone crying—a desperate keening of loss that had shafted into her consciousness on and off throughout the day, even though she didn’t want the awareness.

  “What do you know about waterpainting?” she asked sharply.

  “That it writes the future in the hands of the skilled.”

  How does he know that much? Just who are you, you Alabasters? She curbed her aggravation and asked quietly, “Do you know what that means, Manager Messenjer?”

  He was silent, so she answered for him. “The painting does what it is fated to do, not necessarily what the painter wants. The two are not always the same thing. It’s therefore dangerous. I asked to get out of a prison, and it made an earthquake that brought down part of a city. People died, just so that I could be free.” Maybe her waterpainting had done that; maybe Russet’s. It didn’t matter; the consequences were the same.

  “Then it was God’s will that they died, for waterpainting is surely a gift from God.”

  “No—it was a gift from my great-grandfather: that old man lying in the room behind you in your wife’s care. He’s the one who taught me. Don’t give me that nonsense, manager. Who are you or I to say what’s a gift from the Sunlord and what is not?” She was tired, so very tired, of people telling her what to do; she didn’t want to argue about it. She was unused to the long hours of riding on the salt pan, but it wasn’t physical fatigue that plagued her now; it was the weariness of never being in control of her own fate.

  “A gift from God, not the Sunlord,” he corrected. “There’s no Sunlord.”

  She ignored that and gathered together the shreds of her strength. “I will not waterpaint again. You know why I ride with the man who murdered my father and hounded my mother into a situation that resulted in her death? Because he imprisoned me in his paintings and I can’t free myself. Russet painted me in a place far from here—somewhere in the Watergivers’ land—and I have to go there, whether I like it or not. My mother ran from Russet in terror and despair. I suspect she died because she tried to resist. And yet I have to ride with him, day after day. Tending him as if he was a child in my care. I loathe him. I loathe what he has done to me.”

  She stepped back from the fire and faced Messenjer across the kitchen. “You and your family saved my life. I am grateful for all your help, more than I can say. But once Russet is well again, we’ll be on our way because it is what I have to do. Russet has water tokens; he can pay you for a pede and an escort to the other side of the salt.”

  He didn’t answer that but said, “I want to show ye something.” She was beginning to know him and she recognized the tone he used now: firm, soft, reasonable—with no possibility of dissent. He had not reached the level of mine manager by being weak. She already knew it was a post given by election, not inheritance.

  He took her by the elbow and steered her outside to the ledge, the roadway that had no outer edge, in front of his underground house. “Look,” he said. “Look around, and tell me what ye see.”

  She shivered slightly under the cut of the cold night air. Mine Emery was larger than Mine Silverwall, but the design was similar: tiered levels, each having houses built into the cliff sides. In the daylight, the greenish white of the quarried walls was haphazardly veined with other colors: orange and brown and umber. Now, the open doorways and windows across the mine were patches of yellow lamplight in the darkness. All of the mine must have been awake. When she looked down at the mine floor, she could see the silvery shadows of pedes in the twilight: tens of them, tethered there, feeding on piles of dried samphire fodder brought in from the edges of the Whiteout. Earlier, mounted messengers had left for other mining settlements, to Samphire itself, with the news: Mine Silverwall had been attacked and annihilated.

  “It’s beautiful,” she said to Messenjer. The sound of children’s laughter drifted up from a lower level, clear in the crisp air. The patterns of light on shadowed canyon walls were symbols of a town with a beating heart, its people. She wanted to paint it all, but she didn’t tell him that.

  “Compare it to Mine Silverwall. Remember the silence, the stillness, the unlit houses there. The absence of life. Children no longer play in Silverwall.”

  Terelle shook, either with cold or horror. She wasn’t certain which. He guided her back inside to the warmth of the kitchen where she sat in one of the solid saltblock chairs and wished she could move it closer to the fire. Messenjer took the kettle off and poured her a hot drink. The whitish liquid was salty and sour, but she drank it gratefully.

  “The excretion from the glands of white pedes,” he told her. “Their way of disposing of excess salt.”

  Spluttering, she eyed the drink with less enthusiasm.

  He didn’t notice. “Would ye like to see the Reduners here with their tribesmen and their scimitars and their ziggers?”

  She was silent.

  “Ye can stop it from happening.”

  She looked up at him in amazement. “Me? By waterpainting? I don’t think you understand the limitations of the art! I can’t bring about a future unless I paint accuracies!”

  “Explain.”

  “I know the man who leads the Reduner tribes is a sandmaster called Davim the Drover. But I’ve never met him. Therefore I can’t paint him being killed, or dying. Nor can I paint his camp being wiped out in a—let’s say, in a spindevil wind, unless I know what his camp looks like.”

  “Ah. Then it won’t be as easy as I thought. But there is much we can do. It’s just a matter of giving it some thought…”

  “Easy? Easy? You think it’s easy to kill people?”

  “The Reduners find it easy,” he said. “Remember the children ye saw, clutching each other? I don’t suppose they put up much resistance.”

  She took a deep breath to stop her shaking. “Manager Messenjer, do we really want to be like them? Waterpainting can kill the innocent. I know, because I have done it. Besides, there is something evil about it anyway. I could paint a scene right now, and shuffle your dead image up into it—and you’d fall lifeless at my feet within a heartbeat. In fact a waterpainter could do that to you from the other side of the Quartern if they knew what you looked like! No one should have that kind of power. No one.”

  “It is a gift from God. How can it be an evil thing?” he said. “God forbid that either of us would say all Reduners are evil, but God gave ye waterpainting skills to be using against evil people like those who wield zigtubes and scimitars to kill children. He would never bestow His gifts without a purpose. And He would never bestow the talent on a person who would use it unwisely.”

  She wanted to scream at him: What about what Russet did to me? Isn’t that misuse? Was that the will of God? But there was no point. He did not fully understand the horror of what Russet had done.

  “Leave the girl alone, Mez.” Errica entered the room from the adjoining bedroom and stood there, hands on her massive hips, shaking her head at both of them. “If God
gave her the gift, then he also gave her the goodness to be using it wisely, when necessary.”

  Messenjer made a gesture of apology with one white hand and ducked out of the doorway through the beaded salt curtain.

  “Be gentle with him, Terelle,” Errica said. “He lost a younger brother and a niece and a nephew back there in Silverwall. And we never found the children’s bodies. They were probably taken as slaves. The girl was a beautiful lass: but fourteen, with salt-white hair down to her waist and eyes the color of the palest skies.”

  “That’s awful, and I’m more sorry than I can say. But I still can’t do it,” Terelle said, then added, her stubbornness surfacing, “and he should not ask it of me.”

  “It is his responsibility to help his people. He had to ask. But go and rest now. Ye have traveled long and hard and need your sleep. God is good; trust Him and all will be well.” She indicated the room she had just left. “Take the pallet next to Russet. He won’t wake for a while.”

  It was surprisingly easy to settle into the routine of the mine over the next few days.

  Russet spent much of his time asleep, or feverish and raving. Terelle’s drive to travel east was lessening, so she thought his continued physical weakness must be diminishing the hold his waterpaintings had over her. Occasional restlessness told her the power was still there, but it was easier to resist. Every now and then she thought uncharitably how much simpler her life would be if he was dead. She dreamed up ways to kill him, but in her heart knew she would never have the… what? Courage? Nerve? Malice? Resolution?

  I’m the kind of person who doesn’t have the guts to put a suffering kitten out of its misery. How can I possibly kill a man? If I couldn’t shuffle up Taquar dead, how can I kill my own great-grandfather?